Before the first storm: the pre-season snow blower checklist

The week of the first storm is when snow blowers get repaired, which is why the shops are two weeks out and the parts are backordered by mid-December. The whole checklist below takes about an hour in October, most of it waiting for oil to drain. Gas machines first, battery machines after, and the part that applies to both at the end.

Fuel is the cause of most no-starts. Gasoline with ethanol absorbs water and goes stale in about a month, and what sits in the carburetor over the summer leaves the varnish that makes a machine crank and never catch. The Husqvarna ST124's cold-start complaints end, in most owner threads, with a carburetor swap for exactly this reason. If the tank was left full last spring without stabilizer, drain it, run the carburetor dry, and refill with fresh fuel. Then put stabilizer in every can you fill from now on, or buy ethanol-free fuel where it is sold. A can older than a month without stabilizer goes in the car, not the snow blower.

Change the oil. Small engines have no oil filter, so the oil does all the cleaning and a season of it is dirty. Warm the engine for two minutes, drain it, refill with the 5W-30 the manual specifies; most of these engines take under a quart. While the oil drains, pull the spark plug: a tan electrode goes back in with the gap checked, a black or crusted one gets replaced, and a plug costs less than lunch. Check the recoil cord for fraying and test the electric start if the machine has one, which the Ariens Deluxe 24 does.

The drive system is what fails mid-season. On a friction-disc machine like the Ariens or the Husqvarna, pull the bottom cover and look at the rubber disc: a glazed or cracked edge means it slips in the first wet storm. The Ariens' drive-engagement failures trace to clutch-cable stretch; the manual gives the adjustment, and it is a nut and a lock nut. Then the shear pins. These bolts are made to snap when the auger hits a newspaper or a frozen chunk, and they protect the gear case the warranty covers for five years. Buy a pack of the right pins now, tape two to the handlebar, and never replace one with a hardware-store bolt, which transfers the hit to the gears. Pull each pin once and make sure the auger spins freely on its shaft; an auger rusted to the shaft cannot shear anything.

Set the skid shoes for your surface. On pavement the scraper bar sits an eighth of an inch up. On gravel or pavers raise the shoes so the bar clears three-quarters of an inch to an inch, or you will throw stones through a window; this is also why single-stage machines, which have no skid shoes, are a pavement-only tool. Replace a scraper bar that is worn to the auger housing. Check tire pressure against the number on the sidewall, usually 15 to 20 psi, since a soft tire on one side makes the machine veer.

Rotate the chute through its full travel and work the deflector; a stiff chute in October is a frozen chute in January. Grease the chute ring and the auger-shaft fittings if the machine has them. Then coat the inside of the chute, the auger housing and the impeller with a silicone or snow blower non-stick spray. Wet snow sticks to bare metal and plastic, builds up, and freezes solid; the spray is the cheapest fix for the clogging that stalls every machine on a slush day. Reapply it after each wet storm.

Battery machines skip the fuel and oil and get a different problem: the packs. Lithium packs lose capacity in the cold, and most makers' chargers refuse a pack that is below freezing. So the packs live in the house, charged, and go out to the machine when the storm hits. Charge every pack to full in October and top them up monthly; a pack left dead over the summer may not come back. The EGO SNT2405 runs about 30 to 45 minutes of two-stage clearing on its pair of 7.5 Ah packs, which is one storm on a two-car driveway and not two; a second set of packs is the upgrade that matters if the driveway is long. The EGO SNT2112 single-stage and the Snow Joe 24V-X2-SB18 run on smaller packs and clear smaller driveways, and the same rule applies.

On the machine itself: single-stage paddles and auger edges wear, and most carry wear marks; a paddle worn past them scrapes and stops throwing. Clean the battery contacts with a dry cloth, since the Snow Joe's mid-pass cut-outs trace to the contacts and the handle safety switch. Spray the chute and impeller with the same non-stick coating as the gas machines; the EGO two-stage's long owner thread on wet-snow freeze-ups is a chute-clearing thread, and the coating is the preventive. One trick that helps every machine: keep it in the cold garage or shed, not the heated one. A warm machine melts the first snow it touches, and the meltwater refreezes in the chute.

Three things for both kinds. Order the consumables now: shear pins, a belt, paddles, a spark plug, stabilizer, non-stick spray. Walk the driveway while the ground is bare and remove the hose, the extension cord, the dog toys and the newspaper, then push reflective driveway markers along the edges and at the grass line, since under a foot of snow the lawn and the driveway look the same. And start the machine in October, in daylight, and let it run five minutes. Finding out it does not start in a storm at six in the morning is how the shops get their two-week queue.

For the first storm itself: clear at six to eight inches rather than waiting for the storm to end, throw downwind, overlap each pass by a third, and take the plow berm at the end of the driveway in half-width bites. The cordless shovels, the Snow Joe 24V-SS10-XR and the Greenworks 80V 12 in, handle the steps and the deck the blower cannot reach. The first-winter checklist covers the hand shovels.