These pages are ordered by when the decision actually arrives, not by machine.
| When | The question | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Sep–Oct | Putting it away without buying next spring’s carburetor bill | Storing outdoor power equipment |
| Oct–Dec | Which snowblower, and the spec that actually decides it | What to look for when replacing a snowblower |
| Mar–Jun | How much mower the lot needs | What size mower do you need? |
| Apr–May, Dec–Feb | When the machine is actually discounted, and by whom | Best time to buy a mower or snowblower |
| Whenever it dies | What the machine you are replacing is actually worth | What an old mower is worth |
Climate figures from NOAA/NCEI normals; machine specifications from manufacturers — those sit on the six-to-twelve-month clock. The scrap and repair-cost figures on this page do not: prices carry the three-month re-check, which is the shorter of the two and the one that governs here. Verified August 2026; next scheduled review November 2026.
Sizing a snowblower: the axis everyone uses is noise
Annual snowfall does not separate machines, and the numbers make that unusually clear. Boston 43.0 inches, Detroit 42.8, Pittsburgh 42.8, Fargo 42.6, Spokane 42.3 — five cities, five unlike climates, all within 0.7 inch of each other. Their snowiest months spread 9.1 to 13.1 inches, a 44% range hidden inside the total they appear to share.
Snowiest month does separate them. A month averaging above 20 inches is a two-stage climate whatever else is true. A month under 10 is a single-stage or a shovel. Eleven of the eighteen cities sit between those two lines, where snow type decides rather than depth.
And the second axis is snow type, not depth — which is where the money goes. One manufacturer publishes both a rated depth and a rated snow type per model, and its own ladder shows that stepping from the mid-tier to the two-stage buys no extra rated depth at all. It buys the wet-and-heavy capability. Depth and type are separate purchases and the marketing conflates them. The eighteen-city table and the spec ladder are here.
Storage: the calendar, and where it is wrong
The storage guide is the one piece of preventive content that legitimately saves you the $45–$100 carburetor bill on a walk-behind ($60–$150 on a riding mower), and it is built around explaining why rather than repeating “add stabilizer.”
Two things on it are worth flagging here.
The manufacturers disagree with each other, and the page shows the disagreement rather than averaging it: one says top off the tank and stabilize, another says drain it even if you stabilized it, a third says run it dry. All three are right, for different machines.
And the mechanism usually given is the wrong one. The folklore blames phase separation — ethanol pulling water out of the air until it drops out of suspension. The study that actually stored blends in small-engine fuel tanks through three months of temperature and humidity cycling found that ethanol-free gasoline weathered just as badly, and that fuel was unfit for use well before any separation occurred; in most conditions it never occurred at all. The operative failure is staleness — light fractions evaporating, gum building in the metering jets. Which means buying ethanol-free fuel does not protect the carburetor from the storage failure. Emptying the tank or stabilizing it does. The page discloses that the study was funded by an ethanol trade body, so you can weigh that yourself.
One region-specific correction the page carries in-line: the calendar is a New England shop’s, and New England peaks in January. Denver’s annual total is within half an inch of Minneapolis’s, but Denver’s season runs October to May and peaks in March — so storing on March 1 there means storing the week before the snowiest month of the year.
Timing the purchase
The advice to buy at the end of the season is describing retailer clearance. It is not describing manufacturer rebates, which run on a different calendar entirely: one major brand’s published 2026 US windows put mower offers at April 1 – May 31, inside the season, and three of its four snow blower offers at September 1 – February 28, opening three months before it. What none of them did was discount anything after its own season ended. The dated offer table, with model numbers and the US and Canadian amounts side by side, is here, along with what each discount is worth as a percentage of the machine’s own list price.
Sizing a mower
What size mower do you need? works from lot size to machine class to price band, using the one dimension manufacturers reliably publish. Lot size is not a climate variable, so unlike the snowblower page this one is the same wherever you are.
Disposing of the old machine
An 83-lb walk-behind is $8.30–$10.79 at the light-iron rate yards were paying in August 2026 — around 2% of what it cost new, and a fraction that barely moves when you scale up to a 493-lb zero-turn. A mower costs $6–$7 a pound new and a Toro snowblower $7.41–$9.53, so the band is not one band; but against a light-iron rate of ten to thirteen cents, all six machines this site weighs scrap for 1.0–2.2% of what they cost.
Two things change that number, and neither is the scrap yard. A county air-quality voucher can pay $200 for the same machine — but only while it still runs, which is the one condition a reader asking this question usually cannot meet. And one Ohio program’s rebate is $100 higher when you produce a scrap receipt, meaning the receipt is worth ten times the metal it documents. Both programs, quoted with their limits, plus the weighed composition of a mower and why separating the metals gains about five dollars.
Next: if the old machine is still in the shed and you are deciding its fate, repair or replace. To price a repair on the machine you are replacing, what repairs cost.