ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

And electric snow thrower with a cord can be had very cheap, like under 200 dollars:

https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/certi...p.html#srp

They go up from there, and obviously batteries add some cost.

That is almost exactly what I have. I recommend it. Cord management is annoying but no worse than a cord lawn mower. Depending on how far one has to go this could be a greater or lesser consideration. I use a 30m cord plugged in outdoors and still need to add on an extra cord to get to the furthest reaches of the sidewalk; somebody with a shorter range of required clearing would find this easier.

But based on what I’m hearing here I would have to seriously consider a battery one if I were buying now. The extra cost to avoid dealing with cords might be a good tradeoff.

Yeah, I've used a very similar unit, I found it to be acceptable, but it would have been useless in yesterday's snow. It was kinda handy when I was lazy or my back was hurting, but it wasn't any faster than doing it by hand. Maybe if the snow was particularly heavy but not too deep, it would have been an improvement in shoveling time, but when I didn't have back pain, I shovel pretty fast. But if you're a person who struggles with snow shoveling for any reason it will do the trick for most of our storms.

I had a 100ft cord (so similar length) and that let me do my entire property and my neighbours sidewalks. But cords suck in the winter, because unless you get a very good one, the cold stiffens the plastic casing making them a bit more unwieldy.

While I think corded mowers are just fine for a lot of use cases, I do think battery snow blowers are probably worth the extra investment if you can store them in a garage that doesn't get too cold. And, FWIW I think most of the battery units can use the same battery in a mower in the summer so that's probably a good system to invest in long term.