Types of Snow Shovels

The Bully Tools 92814 that used to hold this slot is no longer available, and Bully Tools no longer sells a steel-bladed snow shovel on Amazon at all — its current snow line is poly and aluminium pushers. This is the closest live equivalent: a flat steel blade on a short wooden D-grip handle, at about the same price.

This is a tool for one job that plastic shovels genuinely cannot do: cutting the compacted, refrozen ridge the municipal plow leaves across the end of your driveway. That ridge is not snow by the time you get to it. It is a slab, and a poly blade skates off it.

A steel blade and a short, stiff handle give you the ability to chop. That capability comes with an obligation: steel is also perfectly capable of chewing the sealant off asphalt, scoring pavers and destroying a composite deck. This is a concrete tool. If your driveway is anything else, buy a poly blade and accept a slower fight with the ridge.

What you give up against the Bully Tools shovel is documentation. The listing states the blade is steel and the handle is 37 inches of wood, and that is all anyone publishes — no steel grade, no thickness, no weight, no origin. Treat the edge as a consumable rather than a lifetime purchase, and keep it off gravel.

The weight is unpublished and it will not be light. If you already have back trouble this is the wrong shovel, and the strain-reducing designs are the right ones. Keep this one for the ridge and use something else for the driveway.

UHMW — ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene — is the material specification that separates this from a $25 pusher. It is the same family of plastic used for conveyor wear strips and truck-bed liners, chosen for a very low coefficient of friction and high impact resistance at low temperature. The practical consequence is that snow slides off it, including the heavy wet snow that packs solid onto a cheap blade and turns pushing into scraping.

The maker states the edge self-sharpens with use and needs no maintenance, and lists the tool as usable on concrete, blacktop, pavers, decks, roofs and ice rinks. That surface list is unusually broad and is the reason we recommend it where a metal edge would be a liability.

Width is the other half of the argument. A 30-inch blade covers 67 percent more ground per pass than an 18-inch shovel. On a 20-by-30-foot driveway that is the difference between roughly 20 passes and roughly 12 — and each of those passes is a push, not a lift.

It is not a complete answer. Nothing that pushes deals with the plow berm, and on a long driveway you eventually run out of anywhere to push to. Pair it with a shovel, or with a machine.

The physics here are simple enough to check without owning one. A snow shovel is a lever, and the load on your lumbar spine depends on how far the weight sits from your hips. A conventional straight-shaft shovel makes your upper hand the fulcrum and your lower back the counterweight. The Shovelution adds a second, spring-loaded grip partway down the shaft, so the lower hand takes the lifting and the spine straightens earlier in the throw.

Snow Joe states the design reduces back strain by up to 30 percent. That is the manufacturer's number and we cannot verify it. What we can verify is the tare weight: 3.5 pounds for an 18-inch blade, which is genuinely low. Weight matters more than it sounds. Twelve pounds of wet snow on a 3.5-pound shovel is a 15.5-pound lift; the same load on a 6-pound steel shovel is 18 pounds, and you are doing it three hundred times.

The blade is poly with an aluminum wear strip. That combination is the right compromise for most driveways: poly is light and does not stick as badly as bare steel, and the aluminum edge keeps the leading lip from rounding off after two seasons. It is not a gravel tool — the wear strip will scoop stone and fling it, and on a composite deck it can leave marks.

The 50-inch assembled height is the real limit. If you are over about six feet you will still bend more than you want, and a longer straight-shaft may serve you better even without the assist. See our straight shaft versus ergonomic comparison for how shovel length maps to user height.

Weight is the specification that decides whether a powered shovel gets used, because you carry it in front of your body for the whole clear, and it is the number most makers in this class decline to print. Snow Joe prints it: 13.6 pounds. That is the lightest published figure of any powered snow tool we can verify is currently in stock.

It also publishes throughput, which is rarer still. Snow Joe states up to 300 pounds of snow a minute through an 11-by-6-inch path, with a throw of up to 20 feet. That is roughly a third of what a 15-amp corded blower moves, which is exactly the right expectation: this is a tool for steps, decks, walkways and short aprons, not a driveway.

A note on the width, because listings disagree. Some retail listings describe this model as clearing a 14-inch path; Snow Joe's own product page says 11 inches, and we go with the maker. Eleven inches is also the useful number, because a standard stair tread is 10 to 11 inches deep.

The cost of being corded is the cord. Snow Joe specifies a 12-gauge extension cord no longer than 100 feet, and a heavy cord trailing around a spinning auger is a genuine trip hazard, particularly for an older user. If that matters more than weight, a cordless tool is the better buy — corded vs cordless works through the distance question.

The True Temper Mountain Mover we used to list here is no longer available, and the only relisting we found carried a generic brand name we could not verify as the genuine article. This entry exists to represent the large-scoop type, and True Temper's #14 aluminum scoop is the clearest live example of that type from the same maker.

The capacity is the point and also the warning. Retail specifications put the blade at roughly 15 by 20 inches and the capacity at 4.5 cubic feet. On light, dry powder that moves a great deal of snow per stroke. On wet snow it is a load most people should not be lifting even once, never mind a few hundred times.

The handle makes it worse. At 27 inches it is very short — this is a Western-pattern grain scoop, designed for shoveling from a truck bed or a bin, not for a standing adult clearing a driveway. You bend to use it, and bending under a loaded blade is precisely the motion that hurts backs.

So it is here as the honest example of its type rather than a general recommendation. If your snow is dry and deep and your back is sound, it moves volume. If either of those is not true, a pusher or an ergonomic shovel is the better buy — types of snow shovels sets out the alternatives.

Once ice has bonded to pavement, a snow shovel is the wrong tool and no amount of technique fixes that. A shovel blade meets bonded ice at a shallow angle and skates over it. A chopper meets it vertically, concentrates your weight into a narrow steel edge, and fractures it. Those are different jobs and they want different tools.

This is the one on this page built for the job rather than borrowed from another trade. Bully Tools puts an all-steel high-strength head on an extra-long fiberglass handle and finishes it with a D-grip, and all three of those choices matter. The steel head takes repeated impact. The extra length means you are standing upright instead of bent over a spot you are about to hit hard. The D-grip is what lets you drive down with your shoulders and body weight rather than steering the tool with your wrists.

The fiberglass handle is the underrated part. Chopping ice sends shock back up the handle on every strike, and a solid steel handle transmits essentially all of it into your hands and elbows. Fiberglass damps some of that. On a long session with a stubborn plow ridge, that is the difference between finishing and quitting.

Bully Tools does not publish a weight, which is a genuine gap on a tool where heft does most of the work — we are not going to estimate one. What they do publish is a limited lifetime warranty against defects across the line, and the tool is made in the USA.

Know what it is not. Seven inches of blade breaks ice up; it does not move it anywhere. Plan on a chopper and then a shovel, and read how to get ice off a driveway before you start swinging, because the order of operations matters more than the tool does.