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    Best Battery-Powered Snow Blowers of 2025

    Some cordless electric models rival gas-powered options. Bonus: You’ll find them easier to maintain, too.

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    A man pushing a Ryobi RY40870 Snow Blower through snow on a driveway
    Cordless electric snow blowers help you save on gas and maintenance costs, and they’re often quieter than gas models.
    Photo: Ryobi

    At Consumer Reports, we’ve been testing battery-powered snow blowers for more than six years. By creating our own snowlike mixture made of sawdust, we’re able to test the performance of battery snow blowers well before winter—and find the best ones to help you through the coldest, snowiest months of the year. 

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    More on Snow Blowers

    There’s always the question of choosing between a battery snow blower and a gas snow blower, though. “Battery snow blowers are really nipping at the heels of comparably sized gas models in terms of performance, and they offer advantages that gas snow blowers can’t match,” says Dave Trezza, who oversees CR’s snow blower tests. 

    Chief among cordless snow blowers’ advantages is that they need neither gasoline nor oil, not to mention engine maintenance. They start instantly with the push of a button and tend to run much quieter than gas models. They’re also lighter and easier to handle, and many single-stage models offer a much lower cost barrier for those on a tighter budget.

    Battery snow blowers are generally good if you don’t have a lot of snow to clear. They come mostly in a single-stage configuration (there are fewer than 10 two-stage models currently in our ratings compared with the almost 20 single-stage models), and single-stage models can’t plow as much snow. While single-stage models are always less effective than two-stage models, the difference tends to be amplified in battery units. For a deep dive into the differences among types—and to learn more about why we use water-saturated sawdust to test snow blowers—check out our snow blower buying guide.

    Below, CR members can read about the best battery-powered snow blowers from our tests. We’ve also included a couple of power snow shovels for those who need to clear a few inches of the white fluffy stuff from decks or small patios (as opposed to snowy driveways). For even more options, see our complete snow blower ratings, which include almost 90 models in six configurations.

    Best Two-Stage Battery Snow Blowers

    Two-stage battery-powered snow blowers are relatively new. They have better snow-removal speeds and throwing distances than single-stage blowers and rival the snow-removal power of similar gas-operated models—handling up to 9 inches of snow.

    Best Single-Stage Battery Snow Blowers

    Single-stage battery snow blowers need a little more time and work to clear the same amount of snow as two-stage models, but they’re substantially cheaper.

    Best Battery Snow Shovels

    Battery snow shovels, or power snow shovels, are better for surface cleaning. They’re also the most affordable snow removal device you can buy (outside of a pure shovel) and offer more flexibility to clear hard-to-reach surfaces.

    How CR Tests Battery Snow Blowers

    As much as we try to do here at CR, we can’t control the weather, and we can’t easily lug all these snow blowers to wintry regions that present the perfect testing conditions. That’s why we created the next best thing: a custom sawdust-based mixture that matches the consistency of actual snow.

    We use this fake snow to test battery-powered snow blowers and snow shovels the same way we test gas snow blowers. This includes manipulating it to reflect a standard snowfall or molding it into a mound to simulate a plow pile, like the ones the town plows leave at the foot of a driveway. In each test, we time how fast a model cuts through the dense mixture; we also note how far the sawdust is thrown and how clean the surface is.

    Pushing Snow Blowers to the Limit

    Check out what our engineers do to ensure that each machine can handle the worst of what winter has to offer.

    We also measure each machine’s noise at the ear of the operator and assess how easy each model is to handle and how user-friendly and intuitive the controls are.

    The Overall Score for each model combines results from these performance tests as well as results of our survey of tens of thousands of CR members, which inform our brand reliability and owner satisfaction ratings.

    For battery snow blowers, brand reliability reflects estimated problem rates by the fifth year of ownership. Owner satisfaction reflects the proportion of CR members who are extremely likely to recommend their machine to a friend or family member.


    Paul Hope

    Paul Hope is a Home & DIY Editor at Consumer Reports and a trained chef. He covers ranges, cooktops, and wall ovens, as well as grills, drills, outdoor power tools, decking, and wood stains. Before joining CR in 2016, he tested kitchen products at Good Housekeeping and covered tools and remodeling for This Old House magazine. You’ll typically find him in his old fixer-upper, engrossed in a DIY project or trying out a new recipe.