Follow These Steps To Get Your Snowblower Back to Fine Working Order
Before winter decides to drop its snowy goodness all across your yard, you’d best prep one of your most important winter tools for action. After all, you don’t want to get caught off guard after some blizzard has done the business to your driveway. That’s why we’ll encourage you to follow these steps to get your snowblower ready for winter before you actually need it.
Get Your Snowblower Ready for Winter Action
Tighten Up
The first step in prepping your snowblower for a winter workout revolves around making sure that all of the handles, knobs, cables, and fasteners are present and accounted for. Chances are probably good that, unless you’re especially hard on your equipment, everything will be where it should be. But, it never hurts to give your snowblower a once-over.
Missing fasteners can likely be replaced with a trip to the hardware store, but some broken or missing pieces might require you to order replacement parts from the original manufacturer.
You’ll also want to kick the tires, so to speak. Make sure that your tires hold air and are set at the proper pressure. You can also add tire chains to increase your traction.
Once you’ve taken stock of all your snowblower’s various pieces, make sure everything is tightened down. Next year, you’ll want this step to be as much of a non-issue as possible, and securing things this year will go a long way to making that dream a reality.
Inspect the Business End of Things
The next step in making sure your snowblower is ready for heavy winter snowfall is making sure all the truly important bits are free from damage or excessive wear and tear.
For a single-stage snowblower, that means checking to make sure your rotor blades and scraper are in good shape. For a two-stage snowblower, make sure that the auger, skids, and scraper are free from excessive wear, denting, or corrosion, and that they’re operating as they should.
As these parts see the most action, it stands to reason that they’ll need replacing from time to time. Again, putting in an order with your manufacturer for genuine replacement parts will ensure that your snowblower runs as intended.
Freshen Up Your Fuel
Getting your snowblower ready for winter calls for a shot of the good stuff. And by that, we mean to fill your snowblower with fresh fuel and oil.
Hopefully, you had the good sense to run your engine dry at the end of last winter. Since you really shouldn’t use fuel older than 30 days, or fuel with a higher ethanol content than 10%, you want to make sure that you don’t have old fuel just sitting around in your tank. Adding a fuel stabilizer can extend the life of your fuel, but realistically, you’ll want to get rid of your gas at the end of the snowy season.
Likewise, if you didn’t change the oil at the end of last season, changing it before this winter is a good idea.
Ditch the Gas and Go Electric
Or, if you’re kind of over the maintenance, summerization, and prep work that a gas-powered snowblower requires, make your life easier by investing in an electric model.
We live in an incredible age where battery power provides a legitimate alternative to gas power. The initial cost to buy a battery-powered model can feel like a hard pill to swallow, but forgoing the eventual cost and maintenance of gas power could offset that initial cost handily. Plus, battery-powered OPE is just so convenient; simply insert your battery and push the button to start up. Apart from checking the condition of your moving parts, you can pretty much ignore the rest of the tips given in this article!
