13 Best Battery-Powered Snow Blowers of 2026, Expert-Tested and Reviewed
The best cordless electric snowblowers from brands like Ego, Ryobi, and Toro rival gas-powered machines. Bonus: You’ll find them easier to maintain, too.
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At Consumer Reports, we’ve been testing battery-powered snow blowers for more than a decade. By creating our own heavy snowlike mixture made of water-saturated sawdust, we’re able to test the performance of battery snow blowers well before winter—and find the best ones to help you through the coldest, snowiest months of the year.
But should you choose a battery snow blower instead of a gas snow blower? “Battery snow blowers are really nipping at the heels of comparably sized gas models in terms of performance, and they offer advantages that gas snow blowers can’t match,” says Dave Trezza, who oversees CR’s snow blower tests.
- Best Battery Snow Blowers: Two-Stage Single-Stage
- Best Battery Snow Shovels
- How CR Tests Battery Snow Blowers
Best Two-Stage Battery Snow Blowers
Two-stage battery-powered snow blowers are relatively new. They have better snow-removal speeds and throwing distances than single-stage blowers and rival the snow-removal power of similar gas-operated models, handling up to 9 inches of snow. There’s not enough survey data on any of the two-stage cordless snow blowers recommended by CR to judge their predicted reliability and owner satisfaction.
Best Single-Stage Battery Snow Blowers
Single-stage battery snow blowers are meant to handle up to only 6 inches of snow, and they’re substantially cheaper than two-stage models. Depending on where you live, a single-stage machine may be just what you need.
Best Battery Snow Shovels
Battery snow shovels, or power snow shovels, are best for surface cleaning, not removal of substantial amounts of snow. They’re the most budget-friendly snow removal device you can buy (outside of a pure shovel) and offer more flexibility to clear hard-to-reach surfaces. CR doesn’t record reliability data for battery snow shovels.
How CR Tests Battery Snow Blowers
As much as we try to do here at CR, we can’t control the weather, and we can’t easily lug all these snow blowers across the continental U.S. to test them in locations that have snow early in the fall. In order to test snow blowers year-round, we created the next best thing: a custom sawdust-based mixture that matches the consistency of heavy, wet snow.
We use this fake snow to test battery-powered snow blowers and snow shovels the same way we test gas snow blowers. This includes manipulating it to reflect a standard snowfall or molding it into a mound to simulate a thick pile like the ones the town plows leave at the foot of a driveway.
In each test, we time how fast a model cuts through the dense mixture. We also note how far the sawdust is thrown and how clean the surface is.
Pushing Snow Blowers to the Limit
Check out what our engineers do to ensure each machine can handle the worst winter has to offer.
We also measure each machine’s noise at the operator’s ear, assess how easy each model is to handle, and judge how user-friendly and intuitive the controls are.
The Overall Score for each model combines results from these performance tests with brand reliability and owner satisfaction ratings from our survey of thousands of CR members. (Note: For specific snow blower subtypes, there is insufficient survey data to provide brand-level reliability and satisfaction scores.)
For battery snow blowers, brand reliability reflects estimated problem rates by the fifth year of ownership. Owner satisfaction reflects the proportion of CR members who are highly likely to recommend their machine to a friend or family member.
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