Types of Snow Shovels

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 edge and a stiff fiberglass shaft give you the ability to chop. That capability comes with an obligation: a steel edge 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.

Bully Tools builds to a commercial spec — the fiberglass handles and heavier gauge steel are what landscaping crews buy — and the practical effect is that it does not become a consumable. Whether that is worth the price depends on how many years you plan to keep it.

The weight is unpublished and it will not be light.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.

Toro publishes what everyone else omits: 12 inches of clearing width, up to 6 inches of depth, a 7.5-amp motor, a 20-foot throw, 300 pounds per minute of capacity, 13 pounds of tool weight, and 6 inches of telescoping handle adjustment. On a site that scores products on published specifications, that transparency counts for a lot.

The 300 lb/min figure is the one to reason from, because it lets you do arithmetic nobody usually can. A 20-by-30-foot driveway under 4 inches of fresh snow holds very roughly 1,500 to 2,500 pounds of snow depending on density. At 300 pounds a minute that is something like 5 to 8 minutes of continuous machine time, plus the walking, turning and repositioning. Compare that with the Snow Joe SJ627E's stated 840 lb/min and the size difference becomes concrete rather than vague.

At 13 pounds it is the lightest powered tool here, and for a carried tool that is the spec that determines whether you finish the job or put it down.

It is a light-snow, small-area machine and Toro says so — sidewalks, steps, decks and small driveways. Point it at a two-car driveway after eight inches of wet snow and you will be disappointed for reasons that were printed on the box.

Volume shovels are for one specific situation: a lot of light, dry snow. If you live where December drops eight inches of powder that weighs almost nothing, a big blade halves your pass count and your arms never notice. If you live where snow arrives at 34°F and lands like wet cement, the same blade is how people hurt themselves.

Snow density is the variable nobody puts on the box. Fresh dry powder runs roughly 5 to 8 percent water content; wet spring snow can be three to five times denser. An 18-inch blade filled with the former is a pleasant lift. Filled with the latter it is well north of 20 pounds, repeatedly, at arm's length.

So the honest guidance is: buy the capacity if your snow is dry, and if you buy it anyway, do not fill it. Half a blade of wet snow is a complete answer and your spine will not file a complaint.

True Temper does not publish a weight or a handle length on the listing we read, which is a real gap for a shovel bought on ergonomics. If those numbers are your deciding factor, the models that do publish them are the safer purchase.

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.