Snow Blower Maintenance

Ask any small-engine shop what comes through the door in November and the answer is the same: machines that will not start because the fuel in them is a year old. Gasoline oxidizes, the light fractions evaporate, and what is left behind in a carburetor bowl is a varnish that blocks passages the width of a pin.

Ethanol makes it worse, because it attracts water and can separate out of the fuel in a tank that sits through a humid summer. That is the failure a stabilizer is designed to prevent.

STA-BIL publishes the numbers that matter: one ounce per two and a half gallons, fuel kept usable for up to 24 months. A 32-ounce bottle therefore treats 80 gallons, which for a machine that burns a few gallons a winter is years of protection for the price of a takeout meal.

The part people get wrong is the last step. Adding stabilizer to the tank protects the tank; it does nothing for the carburetor until treated fuel has actually been pulled through it. Add it, top up the tank, then run the engine for several minutes before you put the machine away.

It is prevention only. If your machine already sat with untreated fuel and will not start, no additive fixes that — the carburetor needs cleaning. And if your machine is electric, this whole category is one of the costs you do not have; what a snow blower costs sets that difference out.

Oil viscosity is written as two numbers — 5W-30 — and for a snow blower the first one is the one that counts. The W number describes how the oil behaves cold, and a snow blower is an engine that is always started cold, often well below freezing, and rarely runs long enough to get properly hot.

That is why the oils sold specifically for snow throwers are 5W-30 rather than the 10W-30 or SAE 30 you find on a mower shelf: Husqvarna's is 5W-30, and so are the snow-thrower oils from Ariens, Briggs & Stratton and MTD. A heavier cold rating means an engine that turns over slowly and runs for its first minute with oil that has not reached everywhere it needs to be.

This one states it exceeds API SJ, which is more than most small-engine oils on a retail listing bother to say, and it is sold for most two-stage four-stroke machines.

Two honest caveats. Ordinary automotive 5W-30 meeting the same API rating will satisfy many manuals for a fraction of the price, and your own manual is the authority on both the viscosity and the capacity. And if your machine is a small single-stage with a splash-lubricated engine and no drain plug, the oil change is a different, messier job than the listing implies.

Draining and refilling is the single most skipped service item on these machines, and it is the one that quietly decides whether the engine reaches its second decade — snow blower maintenance puts it in order with the rest.

A shear pin is a fastener engineered to fail. It holds the auger to its shaft, and when the auger hits something it cannot pass — a newspaper, a chunk of ice, a rock — the pin snaps so the auger stops instead of the gearbox tearing itself apart. Replacing it is a five-minute job; replacing a gearbox is not.

That design intent is why the grade of the bolt matters more than its dimensions. A pin that is stronger than specified does not protect your machine better; it protects it less, because the force that should have snapped a cheap bolt instead goes into the auger shaft, the bearings and the gearcase.

Husqvarna's kit is the straightforward answer for its own machines and Poulan's. It publishes the bolt dimensions, lists every superseded part number so you can confirm fitment on a ten-year-old blower, and — being OEM — is the grade the engineers chose.

Keep the spares somewhere you can reach in the dark with cold hands, because a pin never breaks in the garage. Tape a couple inside the chute cover or the fuel-cap area of the machine itself.

If you are breaking pins often, the pin is not the problem. Either the surface is feeding stone into the auger — see using a snow blower on gravel — or the skid shoes are set too low.

Skid shoes are the two brackets that hold the front of the auger housing off the ground. They set how high the scraper bar rides, they take the wear instead of the housing, and they are the single cheapest adjustment that changes how a snow blower behaves on your driveway.

Poly is the upgrade most people want. Steel shoes rust, streak concrete, and ring loudly over a paver joint; polyurethane does none of that and is kinder to a surface you care about. The trade is wear — on abrasive concrete, poly is a part you replace every few seasons.

What makes this kit the pick is the hardware. The bolts holding your current shoes have been sitting in salt spray for years, and a good proportion of them will round off or snap coming out. A kit with eight bolts, eight nuts, eight washers and the bushing washers means you finish the job the day you start it.

Set them by the surface, not by the bolt slot: on smooth concrete run the scraper close to the ground, and on gravel raise the housing until the auger cannot reach stone — usually a good inch of clearance. That one adjustment is the difference between clearing gravel and firing it at a window.

Canned small-engine fuel is the brute-force answer to the ethanol problem. Instead of adding a stabilizer to pump gas and hoping, you buy fuel with no ethanol in it at all, blended to a consistent specification and sealed in a can that the maker states stays good for five years.

For the right machine that is genuinely the better answer. A snow blower that starts three times a winter, or a generator that starts once a year, spends almost all its life with fuel sitting in it — which is precisely the condition ethanol blends handle worst.

The problem is arithmetic. This is sold by the quart, and three quarts is three-quarters of a gallon. Per gallon it costs several times what the pump charges, so as a routine fuel for a two-stage machine clearing a long driveway all winter it is indefensible.

Use it the way it makes sense: as the fuel you leave in the machine over the summer, or as the entire fuel supply for a small machine that barely drinks. For anything heavier, pump gas with a stabilizer in it does the same job for a fraction of the money.

One label detail worth repeating because the cans look alike on a shelf: this is the 4-cycle version and it contains no oil. The 2-cycle premix sold beside it has oil blended in at 50:1 and will foul a four-stroke snow blower engine.