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This little snowthrower handles our 3-1/2 car long by 2 car wide driveway quite well and quickly. We're in the Philadelphia area, and this winter we got a few 6+ inch snowfalls. I found it easy to go out and do a pass after about 4-5 inches had fallen, and then a second pass later when more snow had fallen. It handled more when I pushed it, but I found it more convenient to just plan to make 2 passes (separated by 4+ hours).
The aim of the throw is easy to adjust. The unit is amazingly light and manueverable, fit easily into our small 2-car garage (along with 2 cars). No gasoline maintenance hassles. Before buying it, I thought dealing with the extension cord might annoy me, but it really hasn't been an issue.
The bottom line is, it just works, it's simple, and it's fast.
I only have two very minor issues/warnings, and neither detracts from the 5 star rating in my opinion, since they are both easy to avoid.
1- If your municipality throws cinders on the road and the end of your driveway, you may not want to run the Toro over the cinders. The cinders are SHARP and one got embedded into the plastic, jamming the unit. I easily fixed this myself once I put the unit back in the garage for an hour or two so the snow melted off and I could see why it was jammed.
After that happened, I decided to just use a shovel on the last 2-3 feet of driveway if the township has already dumped cinders. (I'd rather shovel a couple feet than risk damaging the thrower--and possibly be without it for the next snowfall--and have to dislodge the cinder. Other folks may choose to live with the occaisional jam.) If the township hasn't dumped cinders, I'll use the thrower everywhere, and it even handles the plow crud.
2- The mouth of our driveway is only maybe 7 feet from our neighbor's driveway, though most of the length of the driveway, it's much farther from the neighbor's driveway (both driveways are angled).
When I get near the mouth of the driveway, if I'm not careful, this unit throws the snow TOO FAR, into my neighbor's driveway! I don't want to be a rude neighbor, so I found that with a little practice, "pulsing" the electric motor reduces the throw enough to get the snow to land in the grass between drives. Now that I've practiced the pulsing a bit, it's easy. I imagine that just about any thrower (gas or electric) would have this problem--and I bet that an electric is easier to "pulse" to avoid this problem than a gas thrower is.Get more detail about Toro 1800 18-Inch 12 Amp Electric Curve Snow Thrower #38025.
