Wovel followup

I talked about getting a Snow Wovel a while back, when faced with our first winter at this house.  And the early returns were good.

Anyway, we've had a ton of snow lately, which had me thinking about this gadget.  The extended returns are not quite as good, but still very good.

Basically, the one weakness is that the leading edge of the shovel is very thin, and, consequently, wears pretty quickly.  They do sell something to reinforce that edge (look for Snap-On Wear Strip), and I was too cheap to try it.  Well, get it.  If you buy a replacement shovel, get the wear strip for the replacement, too.

Other than that, it's been fantastic.  It still took quite a while (I didn't check, but I'd guess a couple of hours), but even the 12-16 inches we had a week or so ago wasn't too difficult to shovel.  And I didn't have any back issues (I've had various concerns about that for many years).

So, I'm a little cheesed off that the wear strip isn't included, but that's the only bad thing I have to say about the wovel, overall.  It's done a great job for us for a couple of years already, and I expect it to continue to do so for many more years.

They weevil and they wovel, but...

When we moved, we ended up with a much longer driveway than our old one. This one is 60-70' long, with a rounded area at the end (where the garage is). Back in May, I thought about getting a snow blower, figuring that was the only way to handle a driveway that long, but, while searching, ran across this nifty device (also to be found here).

I think I'd actually heard of it before (maybe a TV commercial a year or two ago?), but had forgotten. It was significantly cheaper than any of the snow blowers, took less storage space (a couple of feet of wall space, but no floor space), and didn't need any maintainance. And maybe it was about as fast (it was suggested in the reviews).

Well, it isn't as fast, at least not for our size of driveway. But the rest of it is true.

I've had mixed results with scraping the surface clean, but it does a fantastic job with dry snow. It's very fast (I can get my driveway done in an hour or so), doesn't kill my back (this is a major plus), and is environmentally friendly. If you're going downhill, it does an even better job of pushing snow along. The scoop is large, and you can really fill it, since you aren't lifting the whole mass.

You can get an wear strip for the front edge; I highly recommend it (cheaper directly from wovel.com than from amazon). Aside from the wear factor, it might help it deal with ice (with which I've had mixed results).

This thing is so good, I ended up clearing a good chunk of my street (100 yards or so) so that I can get to the top of the small (but fairly steep) hill to get out the quick way.

So, yes, I would definitely buy it again, if I had the chance to go back and do it again.