When it snows, my dad takes great pride in keeping the cleanest sidewalk in the neighborhood. My parents live on a busy city street in Boston where the houses aren’t too far apart, so the sidewalk isn’t too long. Still, he leaves it pristine, moving more snow than any of the neighbors and clearing a path twice as wide as the city code requires—using nothing but a shovel.
Every flake, from the curb to the fence and down to the pavement, gets scooped up and over the shrubs, into the front yard. I pitched in when I was kid, of course, straining my arms, back, and lungs as I launched heap after heap of wet snow over the 4-foot shrub when I was barely 5 feet tall. At my own house now, I can’t say that I shovel with the same fervor as my dad. But one lesson I learned for sure is that snowblowers are for babies.
Just kidding (maybe). But in a borderline climate like Greater Boston and the other parts of the US where it snows but not always very much, a proper snowblower isn’t a slam-dunk purchase. The two-stage models that Wirecutter recommends start at $1,100. That’s a big commitment when in some years you might need it only once or twice.
Cheaper single-stage snowblowers aren’t necessarily a better value. They still cost hundreds of dollars, and when you do get whacked with more than 6 inches in a single snowstorm, they don’t really work.
That brings us to electric snow shovels. An e-shovel is a lower-cost snow tool that takes the kind of thrower wheel you’d find on a small electric single-stage blower, strips away most of the other blower features, and attaches it to the end of a pole.
It’s not much use after a big storm, and you’ll still need a regular shovel, but this e-shovel does make it easy to move a few inches of snow off a walkway or a modest driveway.
When hand-shoveling feels like too much of a hassle, but a proper snowblower seems too expensive (or too big or just unnecessary), an electric snow shovel, well, still isn’t quite a happy middle ground. That said, it can be a decent tool if you keep your expectations in check. E-shovels tend not to claim that they can replace a real snowblower. But if you don’t really need a snowblower in the first place, maybe that’s fine.
The category starts at around $90 for plug-in models and gets up to $330 for models with more power and more snowblower-esque features. The most popular e-shovels cost about $150 and can handle snow that’s about 6 inches deep.
I picked out an 18-volt Ryobi e-shovel to test because it’s a popular model from a popular retailer, powered by a popular battery, with a price and a spec sheet that are representative of the larger category. I’ve been using it at my house outside of Boston through the first half of the 2024–25 winter, which has had a handful of minor snowfalls so far—nearly an ideal situation for a tool like this.
I’ve found that the e-shovel’s sweet spot is 2 to 4 inches of slightly dense snow. That’s a little too much heft for me to just push the snow out of the way with a regular shovel, but the e-shovel moves through it smoothly.
After one 4-inch snowfall, I cleared a 40-foot-long public sidewalk, the 30-foot-long walkway in my yard, two small porches, and the snow-covered half of a four-car driveway, all in about 20 minutes (with a few important exceptions that I’ll get into). I’d estimate that the project would have taken about an hour (and probably a couple hundred extra calories, for better or worse) if I’d shoveled by hand. Although the Ryobi e-shovel didn’t make the job effortless, the task was much easier than lifting and tossing all that snow.
The hardest part about digging out from a snowstorm, though, is the wall of slush that the snowplows leave at the foot of the driveway. Even after the moderate 4-inch system that came through, the slush pile was just barely deep and dense enough that the e-shovel struggled, seizing up as I pushed it into the taller parts of the mound. Ditto for some of the drifts that had piled up around my cars. I tried working through the big piles in layers, but I found it easier to clear them with a regular shovel.
Would a stronger e-shovel have worked there? Ryobi’s 40-volt model and the 56-volt Ego e-shovel still promise to get through only 6 inches of snow. The same goes for most single-stage snowblowers, which is why we don’t recommend them in our snowblower guide.
The size and shape of your property matter a lot, too. If you can’t get through the job in 20 minutes, you’ll need another battery. The genuine Ryobi packs are $50 to $70 each. (And if you go with an off-brand e-shovel, you might have trouble tracking down a first-party spare.)
Like other e-shovels I found in the $100-ish range, the Ryobi model can toss snow in only one direction: straight ahead. Although it’s rated for about 20 feet of throw, I found that it manages more like 15 feet a lot of the time. For my 20-foot wide driveway, the best strategy was to clear it in halves, with the eastern half shooting east and the western half shooting west. On my narrow walkway or the public sidewalk, this wasn’t an obstacle at all—I could clear those features in just a few minutes in a smooth back-and-forth motion.
The circumstances don’t always work out for an e-shovel, though. My parents’ neighbors in the city, for example, have a 60-foot driveway sandwiched between two buildings. They can’t really push the snow sideways, and if they try to launch it the long way, they’ll just create huge snowbanks for themselves that the e-shovel would choke on. In their case, a two-stage snowblower (or a plow service) is the only fast option.
I discovered that the e-shovel wasn’t great for very light snows, either. When I had less than 2 inches in my driveway, the Ryobi tool re-scattered the light powder instead of throwing it out of the way, and it did a lousy job of getting down to the pavement. Just pushing the snow with a regular shovel was easier.
I also found, predictably, that the e-shovel struggled with very wet snow. One midseason snowstorm turned to rain for about 20 minutes, leaving us with 5 inches of the heavy stuff; it was great for making snowballs but tough to shovel. I didn’t expect this 18-volt e-shovel to move any drifts or slush piles, but the paddle struggled to move the compacted snow in my footprints. It worked fine on untrodden snow and saved me a ton of time and effort in comparison with shoveling by hand, but a real blower would have made much quicker work of this type of snow, even with the total snowfall at less than 6 inches.
Here’s the calculation you need to make about an e-shovel: How much would you like to pay for something that’s only sometimes much more convenient than a shovel and sometimes completely ineffective?
The average owner rating for the Ryobi e-shovel is 4.1 out of five across roughly 600 reviews at Home Depot (Ryobi’s exclusive retailer). That isn’t a great score, but the ratings are split between owners who find that it works great in their specific circumstances and others who are disappointed that it doesn’t work like a higher-end blower. The pattern is similar for single-stage blowers and many of the other e-shovels available through Amazon. Snowblower ratings break the important 4.5-star mark only once you step up to the two-stage models.
You’ll have to do the math for your unique situation. Personally, $120 for the 18-volt Ryobi e-shovel seems like a pretty good deal for a house and climate like mine. (It’s $170 if you need a battery with it, but that Ryobi pack can have many, many uses.) It would save me at least a few hours of labor every year for the next few years.
Like most Ryobi tools, this e-shovel is covered by a three-year warranty. Now that Home Depot no longer handles Ryobi warranty claims, the value of that warranty depends on whether you live near an authorized service center with a good reputation. For me, I wouldn’t count on the warranty.
Since I’m stubborn and frugal, and I almost never really need to leave the house in a hurry, I’ll stick to my regular shovel—but I can see the merits of an e-shovel, and it’s a reasonable value.
My dad’s not going to get one, that’s for sure.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
