Snow Equipment Buying/Pricing John Deere walk behind

[brucew44guns]

Hope someone cares to comment. I have a concrete slab area behind my double garage doors that get snow blowing in deep all over that parking area. It's hard to get the tractor in there and do a good job of removing, my wife thinks we are too old and beat up now to shovel it off by hand like we have always done.
My JD salesman friend has presented to us for consideration a model 1338 PE walk behind unit. It's their biggest and baddest, 38 inch swath, electric start, Briggs with 16.50 ft lbs torque. About 2700 bucks, ouch!! You guys know of something that is quality, excellent, about this size, and maybe a bit less money? Im willing to get it, have a new 6330 tractor and like JD. But know little about these blowers. Thanks for your advise.

 

[leonz]

Hello Bruce,


For the money he wants you to spend,
you will be better off buying even the
smallest 8 horse BCS 2 wheel tractor and the
smaller 2 stage snow caster as you
can use it the year round.

It will be more money but the utility of
using it the year round will be of more
benefit to you as you will be able to use
it for many other things.

Please look at Earth Tools - Walk-Behind Tractors - (502) 484-3988
This is a family run farm business and they use
2 wheel tractors for the farm they operate.

He test runs every machine he sells before
he gives it to the customer to make sure it
runs right and fixes any issue that may come up
when he test runs the machine.:thumbsup:

 

[spencer1199]

My two cents would be to buy a less expensive walk behind or get a blower for a ridng mower if you have one. We have a 8/26 JD walk behind that we have had for several years. Like any of the other walk behinds we have had things break. I think if you do some checking you might find that JD does not actually build their own walk behinds. I suspect they have some major mfg put them together.

If you normally shovel the area I would think you could get by with a much smaller blower. It would still be faster than shoveling and the small unit will be cheaper and easier to handle in small spaces. You might even want to think about a small single stage that you can pick up and shave down the big drifts. I used to have an old toro snow pup that was great for drift fileting.

 

[grsthegreat]

Do you have to blow off the entire patio? or just a path. I bought a used gas walk behind to do a small walk path of ours where the tractor would do more damage than it would help. Only set me back $200.00 and ive had it 3 seasons.

 

[brucew44guns]

Thanks for all 3 of you fellows suggestions. Truth is, I knew very little of nothing about any snow blower. Since I posted, I've spent some considerable time here on the web and been looking. Today, I went in person to John Deere and looked a couple things over. That 38 incher is a brute, and not needed for my work here. I have not decided yet, but JD does have some 28 inchers and a 27 I believe it was, that looked pretty beefy and plenty able for about half the cost of that monster 38 inch. I'll keep looking a bit more, I will look at Ariens, and at least one more brand before I get one. My wife is always big on power and beef with tools and rigs of all sorts, a 2700 buck snow blower would just about guarantee me not getting any snow for 8 years!! Thanks again.