Best Snow Blowers for $1,000 or Less

If you live in a region that doesn’t get heavy snowfall, you can settle for a single-stage gas snow blower that’s most effective removing up to 9 inches of snow.

Consider single-stage battery-powered snow blowers for affordable, cordless models that are all electric. They can displace up to 6 inches of snow.

For the most affordable and flexible snow removal, take a look at these powered snow shovels. You can easily transport them around your estate grounds to remove up to 6 inches of snow from hard-to-reach areas.

Two-stage gas snow blowers are best for medium to heavy snowfall of up to 16 inches. There are no two-stage models we test that cost less than $1,000. The closest you can get is about $1,300, and we’ll show you those models ahead.

To accurately judge a snow blower’s effectiveness in different conditions, our testers have to use them in a variety of scenarios. But because we can’t control the weather, we had to come up with methods of consistently fabricating these conditions. 

"We need to run our tests with something we can standardize, for consistency," explains Dave Trezza, who oversees snow blower testing at Consumer Reports. He and his team use a mixture of a certain type of sawdust, saturated with water, in place of snow. It’s a combination that can simulate a standard snowfall or be molded into a mound, similar to a plow pile, like the kind that town plows leave at the end of your driveway.

In each test, we time how fast a model cuts through the dense mixture and note how far the sawdust is thrown and how clean the surface is. 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.

We test single-, two-, and three-stage gas snow blowers from brands such as Ariens, Craftsman, Cub Cadet, Honda, Husqvarna, Toro, and Troy-Bilt. And we look at lighter-duty, single-stage and two-stage electric blowers from brands like Ego and Snow Joe, as well as power snow shovels from brands like Greenworks and Toro. We also test power snow shovels in the same way we test snow blowers, but we use far less of the sawdust mixture—because for anything deeper, you’ll want a traditional snow blower.

Not sure what the difference is between a single-stage snow blower and a three-stage model? On the “Consumer 101” TV show, CR expert Dave Trezza explains to show host Jack Rico everything you need to know about these snow-tossing machines.