Modding my snowblower

[JRMichler]

Snowblower engines normally have the intake coming from a warm place. They also do not have air filters.

Warm air makes carburetors run richer, so snowblower engines are set up to run lean when cold.

[Arragonis]

Mine uses less fuel than yours

[Frank Lee]

I used that kind up until this year, and we get a lot of snow!

[Arragonis]

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

[RedDevil]

Hmm. Grill blocks for cars work in the cold because it was designed to cope with heavy loads under high ambient temperature, and is overdimensioned in cold conditions.

The snow blower on the other hand is probably not optimized for tropical temperatures. I havent been to the subtropics very often, so bear with me, but I never saw snowblowers being used there at all.
So it may just be that the engine and its warm up time were designed just for winter conditions, and rushing the warm up puts it in a situation that was not anticipated by its designers. It will probably be fine, but you are venturing where no snowblower has gone before.

[Arragonis]

Why not mod your snow blower into, er, nothing - and buy a shovel.

And I thought we brits were soft

[Frank Lee]

Are you thick? I've been shoveling exclusively for decades. I was just given this thing- put gas in it three times now; still shovel for the light snows. I've put way, way more energy into that shovel than I have into this blower! Eventually shoveling three foot deep snow gets old, just like my carcass. My favorite snow is that hard, heavy, icy, lumpy, dense crap the plow loves to fill the first 10' of my driveway in with every other day.

I like my engines to warm up fast- the moving parts like each other better that way, the oil gets kicked around more, and I can open the choke fully sooner and open the throttle all the way.

All I've done is the same thing that's been on all my Corvairs and VWs for the last 50 years: slow the cooling air down from a gale force to a breeze for the first few minutes when it's cold. Sheesh.

[Cobb]

I bet this is the easiest of all to make an "EV". All you need is a motor to turn 3500 rpms, a battery, switch and charger.

[Frank Lee]

I've thought about that... actually I thought of using a/c and a cord; since I don't have to cover the entire yard like an electric mower would, I think the inconvenience of managing the cord wouldn't be so bad. Plus batteries hate cold.

[razor02097]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Mine uses less fuel than yours

Hrmm.....

A 180lb male shoveling snow for an hour burns about 500 calories per hour (reference from sparkpeople.com)... a Jr bacon cheeseburger is $1.29 (reference from a local Wendy's) and is 400 calories (reference from Wendy's.com)... so it's $1.61 per hour. The average snow shovel holds about 4/10 cubic foot of snow. A cubic foot of snow weighs 15 lbs (both referenced from http://dailyperk.perkstreet.com/how-to-shovel-snow/). So each shovel will remove about 6lbs of snow which means it would take 334 shovel fulls to move one ton of show. If the man can shovel 1 scoop for ever 4 seconds it would take approximately 22 minutes to move one ton of snow. This means if the person worked one hour straight taking 4 seconds to remove one ton of snow that person would move 2.72 tons of snow per hour.

An average 4 stroke snow blower can run about 3.5 hours on 1.5 gallons of fuel... which means at lets say $4 per gallon fuel would mean it would use $1.71 worth of fuel per hour. That snow blower can move approximately 35 tons of snow per hour.

(Reference from powerequipment.Honda.com)

This means the human would have to work 12.87 hours to move the same amount of snow. In theory if the human could do that work and consume only jr bacon cheese burgers it would cost $20.72..... plus the person would die of exhaustion...which is bad.