Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

We had a lot of sleet and freezing rain early in the week which turned in to 2-3" of solid ice. I finally broke up the layer of ice in the drive way over the last 2 days. Some pieces where it up to 2 feet long or so and all of it was as very hard not slushy.

I chose to push all of it away manually with a shovel. Just wondered if anybody would have felt comfortable doing the cleanup with a typical 2 stage (I have an Ariens compact 22)?

I was worried the large amount of very solid ice would have been really hard on everything and may have broke the shear pins.

You could try and find out how it goes but I would be a little weary of actually doing it since you can throw ice chunks and break windows or hurt someone.  Breaking shear pins would not be main concern since throwing ice chunks can be dangerous as your blower is pretty powerful one.

I was in the same situation in North Jersey.  I did most of the snow clean up with a shovel.  I had to go out a little later in the day and noticed many people using 2 stage blowers to clean the ice/snow/sleet build up.  When I got home I chopped up some pieces of leftover ice still clinging to the driveway just to get them into smaller pieces and then went over them with the blower.  I went slow and was careful where I pointed the chute and had no problems. 

I scraped my ice up that morning when it was still 35 - 40 degrees.  I just made it as it was getting cold fast and starting to snow.   I used the coal shovel to scrape it up into piles.  The pieces were not huge, but they were decent size and very heavy with the water and slush mixed in with them.  I switched to the blower to throw the piles into the yard.  It seemed to shred the stuff up as what came out was very small.  I guess mine never had the chance to freeze fully solid so it was a bit easier.  No problems and didn't really hear much banging so it must have been getting chopped up before it was thrown.  Of course I had the chute lower and watched where I aimed it.

i  'scrape and chop'  to separate the ice from the pavement , and make sure the pieces are no larger than my shoe/boot and then like shryp said coal shovel them in a pile and blast the pile away, and so far i've never had a issue with shear pins breaking on my 30" bucket.

I've done it a few times already with my Toro 826OXE not sure if its good or bad but it cleared huge piles with no issues...........I guess it all comes down to how big and frozen the chunks really are.