No two snowflakes are alike, and that presents a problem for CR’s testing protocol. “We need to run our tests with something we can standardize, for consistency,” says Dave Trezza, who oversees our snow blower testing. That’s why he and his team use a mixture of a certain type of sawdust, saturated with water, in place of snow. It’s a combination that can simulate a standard snowfall or be molded into a mound, similar to a plow pile, like the kind that town plowing trucks leave at the end of your driveway.
In each test, we time how fast a model cuts through the dense mixture and note how far the sawdust is thrown and how clean the surface is. The Overall Score for each model combines results from these performance tests as well as results of our survey of thousands of CR members, which informs our brand reliability and owner satisfaction ratings.
We test single-, two-, and three-stage gas snow blowers from brands including Ariens, Craftsman, Cub Cadet, Honda, Husqvarna, Toro, and Troy-Bilt. And we look at lighter-duty, single-stage, and two-stage electric blowers from brands like Ego and Snow Joe, as well as power snow shovels from brands like Greenworks and Toro. We also test power snow shovels in the same way we test snow blowers, but we use far less of the sawdust mixture because for anything deeper, you’ll want a traditional snow blower.
