3 Best Three-Stage Snow Blowers of 2025, Lab-Tested and Reviewed
If you need to move piles of snow in a hurry, these heavy-duty machines will do the trick
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Raise a frostbitten hand if you like clearing snow. We thought not. Fortunately, three-stage snow blowers (sometimes called snow throwers) tackle that woeful winter chore up to 30 percent faster than two-stage models, Consumer Reports’ tests find, in part because they can clear deeper snow with a single pass. How can we be so sure? We’ve run these models through countless piles of moisture-saturated sawdust designed to simulate snowfall.
Best Three-Stage Snow Blowers
Consumer Reports has tested several three-stage models over the years, and the following three delivered similarly strong performances.
How CR Tests Snow Blowers
In our removal-speed test, we time how quickly each model removes a standardized pile of simulated snow. In our plow-pile-removal test, we run the snow blower up against a large mass of our fake snow and make a visual assessment as to how well a model is able to manage the task. We also run tests that note how far the "snow" is thrown, how clean the surface is, and how easily the machine handles.
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.
Who Needs a Three-Stage Snow Blower?
“Upgrading from a two-stage to a three-stage snow blower adds an accelerator, boosting the power with which snow can be discharged from the chute,” says Misha Kollontai, one of CR’s test engineers in charge of snow-blower testing. If you live in a climate that’s frequently battered by heavy snowfall or blizzards, you’ll want a three-stage model.
Two-stage blowers have the collection augers and impeller, but don’t have the accelerator. Single-stage models rely solely on a quick-turning auger.
The main discernible downside to three-stage gas snow blowers is their predicted reliability, which likely lags behind two-stage models in our member surveys due to the extra mechanical parts needed to make all this happen.
On the upside, some of these models can be more cost-conscious alternatives compared with the top-performing two-stage varieties in our tests. However, you might not get the extra power promised by these budget-friendlier three-stage options, though they’ll still have the capacity to chew through taller piles of snow (up to 18 inches, as opposed to an average of only 16 inches for two-stage snow blowers).
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