Snow Joe Corded Electric Snow Blower with Dual LED Lights, 22-Inch Clearing Path, 15-Amp Motor - Heavy-Duty Blowing Machine for Ice Removal from Driveway, Sidewalk, and Walkway, SNJ-SJ627E

INTRO-1: I live up in the Pacific North West, and we are plagued by horrible winter storms. Most of the time we get very little snow, but on occasion, we really get the snow. I chose not to go with a gas blower for 3 reasons. (1) Gas blowers are very expensive! (2) Gas blowers require lots of maintenance, they have an engine afterall! (3) We rarely get enough snow to warrant the power of a gas blower. However, when you look at my pictures, you can tell I could have used a gas blower for the drift alone, but thats what a shovel is for lol. Like I said, most of the time we don't get this much snow, if we get any at all, so it made sense to save money, and go electric.INTRO-2: When choosing a snow blower, you have to think about the job at hand. How much snow do you get? Are you within 100-feet of an electrical outlet? Perhaps you want to skip corded electric and gas all together and go with a cordless electric? I watched video's online of cordless blowers, and to be honest, I am not really impressed. For one thing, they cost as much as a single stage gas blower, and they perform worse then a corded electric. So for me the choice was simple. I chose the 21" 15-AMP electric snow blower form Snow Joe.ASSEMBLY: Assembling this blower is very easy, all you have to do is attach the handles, wheels, chute control arm, and chute top, everything else comes already assembled. If your not sure, just follow the directions in the manual. Assembly can be completed within 30-minutes if you are slow at assembling things, or within 10-minutes if your quick.CORD: Because not everybody knows this, I feel the need to quickly mention that you must match the cord to the draw of the machine. This machine requires a minimum of a 12 gauge 3 conductor electrical cord. I highly recommend you purchase a US & WIRE Extreme cable sold on Amazon, as they remain flexible and easy to manage in freezing and sub freezing temperatures. Also make sure to get the proper length you need. Tiny driveways you can probably get away with a 50 footer. For average size driveways, you want a 100 footer. And don't get anything over 100 feet unless you step up to a 10 gauge 3 conductor cord.MOTOR: This snow blower uses a 15-AMP motor, which averages around 1500-watts of draw. A standard garage circuit or household circuit, has a 20-AMP max breaker capacity. This motor will draw 1800-watts peak power during motor startup only. Because of this, please make sure there is nothing else running on the circuit, otherwise you might risk tripping your breaker. This motor has lots of power for what it was designed to do, and it sure didn't disappoint me!BLOWER: The blower has a 12-inches tall opening by 21-inches wide. It is designed to take on no more then 1 foot at a time, however its pretty slow doing that even with fluffy snow. The blower seems to excel at tackling 6-inches to 8-inches at a respectful pace. Like I said, it will handle a foot of snow at a time, but it will be slow going. If the snow is over a foot tall, you will have to tilt the blower up to take off the top layer first, then come back again to take off the bottom layer.If your drifts are between 2-feet to 3-feet you can forget it, you will never tilt it high enough, and be able to push it through the drift. Your just going to have to grab a shovel if your in that situation and remove the top layer of the drift with a snow shovel first, then come back with the blower after that. I took a picture of the snow blower next to a drift that is too tall for the capacity of the machine. I just needed to shovel that top layer off there, then I could come back with the blower and finish it up.DRIVE: I want to remind everyone, that this blower is not self propelled. Your not going to find self propelled at this price point. This is a blower that you have to push. If you are a senior citizen, or someone with a disability, you might find pushing this thing difficult. However, if you are healthy, you can push this blower no problem, as long as you are not pushing it beyond its recommended limits.AUGER: This is a single stage snow blower, hence it has an auger, but no impeller. The auger spins at a blindingly fast rate, which grabs the snow via the rubber paddles, and throws it through the chute. The rubber paddles are replaceable, but I haven't seen any wear after a single use! On the left side of the blower is a panel that you can remove, to give you access to the sealed belt and pulley's, that link the motor to the auger. This was a good design to help keep snow away from the belt! The belt and pully's are also replaceable if they should wear out on you.CONTROLS: The controls at the operator position are very simple. You have the safety start button, the start bar, the LED headlight, and the chute direction control. In order to start the blower, you have to press and hold the safety button, and then pull back the start bar against the handle, easy! The direction of the chute can be operated remotely via the directional control arm, but the vertical up/down movement has to be done manually at the chute itself. The LED headlight has a on/off switch on top of it, so you can choose weather to run it or not, and the light position is adjustable.WHEELS: The wheels on this blower are not the greatest in the world, however, they are not the worst either. While I would have preferred pneumatic wheels, you won't find those in this price range. At least this blower didn't come with those cheap noisy plastic wheels found on kids big wheels. The wheels move over the driveway pretty well, so I am not going to fault them too much. But the reason I would have preferred pneumatic wheels, is because they are superior at moving over terrain.HANDLE: The handle itself provides a nice foam grip for your hands. It would have been nice if it were heated but again, not found in this price range. If you just wear a thick pair of winter gloves you will be fine. The handle doesn't seem to flex much at all, which really is a surprise considering the cost of the machine. I've actually been quite pleased with the handle, and I can even hang it up on the wall via the handle, so multi-purpose abilities are the way to go here.CLEANING: Cleaning up the blower is very simple, all you need is a small broom, and you just sweep the snow off of it, thats really the only maintenance you need to do on it! If it were a gas machine, you would have to worry about draining the carburetor of gas, and changing the oil for the next season.CONCLUSION: In conclusion, this is a very nice snow blower. It tackles everything I need it to do, except for the drifts. It has plenty of power for what it was designed to do, and it gets the job done. I'm actually happy that I didn't go with a lesser 13-AMP 18" model, as that would have been a pain to use in this situation. This 15-AMP 21" model was surprisingly easy to use. And if your concerned with the noise factor, well, this electric machine can be run without hearing protection on, so it won't annoy your neighbors early in the morning either. If your looking for an electric model, I recommend this one!

I bought this snowblower in Feb of 2018. I live in a smallish town in northern Minnesota, so we get a lot of snow, but I live in neighborhood instead of the country so I only need to move snow out of my short, but wide, driveway and clear the snow plow berms from the end.I don't have a lot of room to store things, so I loved how small and light this item is! It takes up very little room in my small, one car garage compared to traditional snowblowers. And, it sort of "unfolds" so you can hang it up in the garage so it takes up no floor space. I love that it is electric, so I don't have to worry about running out of gas and it is much quieter! I usually have to be at work before dawn, so I don't worry so much about the noise of this motor bothering sleeping neighbors. And, I was surprised that despite it's small size and electric motor it handled all my snow removal needs. It pitched really light snow, and even moderately heavy snow, further than I expected, pitching it a little too far! I had to really be careful not to dump it into my neighbor's driveways.However, understand it doesn't eliminate all the effort on the handler's part. The wheels are not motorized and you still have to push, which may be tiring. And, you have to squeeze the handle the whole time, which can cause some hand cramping. Also, if you have very deep snow you have to go slowly, rocking back and forth and angling the opening and taking small "bites" from the top layer then go over again and again until you get down to the ground, despite being light this maneuvering can be sweaty work. After all that, it still may leave a thin layer of snow as it skims along the ground. All said and done, it may not be fast or effortless, but it is still way easier than moving the snow with a traditional shovel, especially if you have a lot of snow over the course of the winter, and develop tall piles along the sides of your driveway and sidewalks, this will definitely save your back from lifting snow.The only big con, in my opinion, is just the limits of the cord. You do have to watch where your cord is as you go and be careful not to get it caught. Also, depending on the length of your cord, you can only go so far. The longer the cord the more power drop off you could have, so I kept it to 50 feet, which serves 95% of my needs. Note, I did do my research and took care to buy an appropriate cord (I bought a 12/3 15 amp heavy duty cold weather rated cord, which was about half the price of the snowblower itself, but worked like a champ). But this is just the trade-off for being electric, so if you don't want to hassle with a cord, go with a gas engine.A couple of minor cons: The part that holds the snow blower chute angle in position broke and the screw for the chute directional crank handle kept vibrating loose. For the part that adjusts the angle of the shoot I was able to rig it into a permanent upward angle, but no longer could adjust it on the fly. The screw holding the crank handle for the direction of the chute I caught vibrating loose before it fell out completely and got lost and I was able to apply some Loc-tite and it was fine after that. Overall these seem like minor things but are reasons for just 4 stars.Now, one must accept that this thing is not really meant for hard core work. It's definitely got its limits. Apparently the limit is moving a 2 foot high, 1 foot wide, 25-30 foot long, hard-packed, icy berm of snow plow debris. Chewing through that on several occasions and accidentally catching some large-ish rocks eventually did it in. But it was not until after almost three winters (consisting of roughly 12-14 months of snow moving on a very regular basis) and tackling all sorts of snow conditions that this little machine finally conked out on me. But, I am not disappointed nor surprised. I used and abused it. And, if you figure considering the original price I paid for the snow blower and the cord together, the equipment cost came to roughly $11-13 per month for snow removal. I don't think that's bad at all.As a testament to how pleased I was with this snowblower, I just ordered the exact same model as a replacement for my first one that died last week (perhaps I could see if the original one could be repaired, but I am pretty sure that just the labor would cost $50-75, plus parts on top of that, so repairing it probably wouldn't save much money). In fact, if the second one lasts me another 3 years, and I continue to have to replace them every 3 winters I will still consider this an excellent deal.So to sum up, if you have a small driveway and just a few sidewalks, this could be a great snowblower for you. If you have a huge driveway, or have to plow areas further than 50 feet from an outlet, it's probably not the right equipment for you.