Snow blades on ride-on mowers - do they work?

[nothanks]

We've had a lot of snow so I'm wondering whether it's worth buying or making a snow blade (and getting some chains or snow tyres) for the ride-on mower. Has anyone here tried clearing snow with a mower?

[Huge]

John Deere do a snow-blower for my ride-on.

It's significant that they don't sell it in the UK. It doesn't snow often or hard enough to justify buying one. TBH, I wouldn't bother.

[Andy Burns]

TFFT, when it's snowy it makes everywhere generally quieter, imagine if we had the din of snowblowers instead?

[Harry Bloomfield]

[e-mail] explained :

I have a bit of drive to clear - it takes a couple of hours to clear by hand with a snow shovel. I was thinking to make one, but decided that for the rare time it does snow, where the amount would justify the the time and cost, it just wouldn't make sense. Now I'm retired I can just wait for it to melt anyway.

[Mark Allread]

I wouldn't try making one (its very difficult to to get the correct angles for proper clearance) but you can buy them. Frankly I don't think they are worth the money as we seldom get the volume of snow to justify them.

The local ag mechanic has adapted a powered walk behind lawn mower by attaching a snow blade to it. It *sort of* works but took him ages to build. He wanted to try it out with a view to producing some for sale but decided it wasn't worthwhile.

Have you tried using a leaf blower to clear the snow? It works well on fresh and or powdery snow.

[nothanks]

Thanks for the responses. I've chatted to a few people today and the consensus was that for anything more than a few inches ride-ons don't have enough weight or power. It seems that a dedicated snow blower might be a better bet, but that seems OTT for the amount of snow we usually get.

[Brian Gaff]

Sounds a bit counter intuitive to me. Our snow in the UK is normally very wet and sticky, and the usual effect is a gummed up mower. Brian

[Capitol]

I bought a tiny stand alone, push along electric snow blower in the US for use here. It hangs up in the garage and has been used twice for snow clearing. It's a lot easier than a shovel! It throws the snow about 20 ft.

[fred]

We once had a Westwood ride on mower. I bought lots of attachments for it. Snow blade. Electric spray with tow behind fluid container, fertilizer spre ader. All were completely useless. The snow blade just rode uo over the acc umulated snow. The electric sprayer, I could pee better. The fertilizer spr eade just dumped all the fertilizer in the first few yards.

But they were good mowers.

[Muddymike]

I've tried using a snow blade with past ride on mowers but even the Hayter 18/42 just didn't have enough traction to do the job. The open rear diff just leaves you with one wheel spinning.

I now have an ex MOD Snapper 12hp 24 inch pickup two stage snow blower. It has fixed drive to both wheels plus proper snow tyres and even then it sometimes spins on the slope up to our drive. Other than the occasional traction problem its a fantastic machine which easily throws most snow 40ft and only struggles with half melted slush.

See it in action here.

Mike

[Huge]

Nice.