 This is a snow scoop. I'm going to compare how this snow scoop and a shovel compare to one another as well as to a snow blower. A lot of us spend a lot of time in the winter moving snow around. I want to see what is the caloric and other investments that we have to put into doing this and I want to compare them in a fairly scientific way. So I've got a heart monitor on. I'm going to compare how much gas it takes, calories, time, labor, all those things. So we have a semi scientific way to say which one is better, which one is right for you. My money is on the scoop but we'll see how it goes. This is not my usual pattern. Usually I do one line and then clear the whole thing but because I'm doing a comparison, I'm doing half of the driveway with the scoop. I'll do half with the snow blower and then I'll do an equivalent amount with the shovel and then I can compare all three of them. The snow is all the same. It all felt the same. It's going to be similar conditions out. So here I go. I'm done now with the snow blower. Let's see how we did. Looks like the same amount of snow. It took me 14 minutes and I only burned 96 calories. So right off the bat, half the calories, two-thirds of the time. I probably could have gone faster if I was a little more efficient. Now we'll see how much gas I used. To do that, I'm going to refill it and I filled it to a specialized level before and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a container, pour gas into it, measure it, fill it back up, measure the container again. The difference of course will be how much gas I put in which will tell me how much gas I used to do this third of my driveway. I measure all of them out. Let's see. This weighs 5.9 ounces or 166 grams. Now I'm going to fill this puppy up to the same level as when I started. It weighs 1.9 ounces so I use 4 ounces of fuel which is great for math because that is nice and round or 50. Now I'm down to 55 grams so a little over 100 grams. So that works out real well. Now I'm going to bring this back to my neighbors. Thanks to Joe and Susan who live next door and have this single-stage Toro snow blower. Let me use it for my crazy science experiments. If you're curious this is a power clear 518ze 18 inch width four cycle engine with an electric start so that's pretty cool. Anyway so thanks to them again and we are not getting anything from Zorro in compensation for this. No endorsement, no non endorsement. It's a snow blower. All right let's bring this back to the neighbors. To the really old school we're going to clear the rest of the driveway. The last third with a shovel 18 inch by one foot shovel. Nothing special about this thing. I've had it for a long time. I imagine that this is going to be the real heavy calorie buster and also the slowest. So let's see. Let's see how it goes. Turn off my recording. Okay so that's 25 minutes. So obviously the longest, obviously the most calorie intensive. I got to go crunch the numbers to see exactly how much volume I did here and then we'll then we'll have a look and we'll compare snow blowers, snow scoops and snow shovels. Okay I've collected all my data outside and now I am going to try and summarize it all together. Look at the numbers we got and compare a snow blower to a scoop to a shovel and see which one is really more efficient and in what way. Okay I've run the tests outside. I've got all my data so now let's put it all together, run some analyses and see how a snow blower compares to a shovel and a snow scoop. So as you can see here we've covered about the same amount of area for each one. So we ended up covering a little over 800 square feet per method. Each one took a little bit different amount of time. The snow blower was the least. It only took 14 minutes to do the 813 square feet whereas the scoop took 18 and a half minutes and the shovel took 25 minutes and we can calculate the the calories or the amount that I actually labored while doing that from my heart rate monitor and the blower only took 96 calories whereas the scoop took twice that over 180 and the shovel took almost 300 calories just to do the same amount of work. It's all about the same amount of snow that I moved because I know the the snow weighed two pounds eight eight and a half ounces per square foot. Okay I need to quantify my snow and so what I've done or what I'm doing is grab my measuring tape and I'm taking random measurements so that's four inches deep and I'm going to take a series of measurements across this open area here three and a half four inches two and a half three and a half four four inches four three and a half four and then I'll average that to get an average depth of snow across my driveway here. Another thing I've done is I've taken a square foot of snow and I've weighed it and that weighed two point two pounds eight point eight ounces so I can quantify how much how heavy this snow is because as you know some snow is light and fluffy and easy to move and other is very dense so I'll have a density measurement so what I'll be able to do is compare how much actual weight of snow I'm moving which will keep things a lot fairer than if I just measured how much area I need to measure the volume of snow I'm actually moving. I can calculate that I moved about a ton of snow a little over two thousand pounds per method so pretty easy math I moved a ton of snow each time and it took me that amount of time and those amount of calories and that data can then be plugged into a series of analyses to let us really crunch down on comparing these apples to oranges when we're comparing snow blowers to snow scoops to snow shovels. For those that are interested in seeing all the data head over to the lowtechinstitute.org that's lowtechinstitute.org I'll link to the page that has all the data from this study on it so you can you know crunch the numbers yourself if you want but if you just want the headline version this video is for you. Now I've already noted that my calorie use was was pretty different for each one and I think a lot of the reason has to do with that is the amount of work I did and when I say work I'm talking about the idea and physics of work a jewel is really what I'm using it a jewel really roughly and I know if you're a physicist or if you're interested in physics I know I'm being pretty loose with this but a jewel is about the amount of energy it takes to pick up a tomato and lift it one meter so about a hundred grams lifting it one meter so what does that mean when we're looking at our snow removal here well if you look at the scoop the scoop only lifts the snow just up onto the bank it lifts it about a meter so I lifted over the entire time that I did the 18 and a half minutes I lifted a ton of snow one meter and so that tells me how many jewels of work I did but when you look at the shovel you can see that I'm throwing that snow a lot higher I'm getting it up over my head so that's imparting two jewels for every one of the scoop so I lifted that ton of snow two meters up with the shovel that probably tells me why I have a time and a half more calories used per ton of snow the snowblower on the other hand if you look at the snowblower it's also kicking that snow up about two meters so it's doing twice the amount of work as a scoop but I only burn 96 calories because the fossil fuels the the gasoline is actually doing all the work so when you put it all together you can see that the scoop only put in about nine and a half thousand jewels of work whereas the shovel and the snowblower did almost 20,000 or twice as much work and that's just because they you know move the snow up twice as high it's more work to fight gravity twice as much I only burn 96 calories though with a snowblower because we're not really taking into account the fossil fuels so kind of at the outset we're seeing that it looks like the scoop is the worst because I only generated 51 jewels for every calorie I expended but then if you look at the shovel it's at 67 jewels per calorie so it's slightly more efficient even though I'm doing more work so you have to balance those but then if you look at the blower I'm able to generate 196 jewels for every calorie I burn four times as good as the scoop but there is a slight misrepresentation here because we're also using gasoline and gasoline has a ton of embodied energy in it so we have burned four ounces of gas and a gallon of gas weighs 6.3 pounds each gallon of gas has 31,500 calories in it and so that four ounces was 1250 calories and so really when you put all the calories together the snowblower is burning through a lot more calories and if you think about it if you were to create a bicycle powered snowblower think about how frantically you'd have to pedal to produce the same amount of power that that snowblower is that's where that kilocalorie it's it's not as efficient as a scoop or a shovel it's just isn't but because there's so much power there you don't really notice how hard it's working to do that amount of work so when we add back into the into the formulas here the calories put on by the gasoline the snowblower is only putting out 15 jewels per calorie which is a quarter or less than I'm able to do with the scoop or the shovel so I'm a much more efficient machine but the gas gives it a lot more power and then it got me thinking well if I burn 96 calories just walking behind the snowblower well that's kind of like my base rate outside I'm burning 96 calories every 15 minutes or every 14 minutes that I'm walking around out there so when I was moving the scoop actually night a percentage of those calories were actually used just to keep me up an ambulatory not the scooping so if we remove that as the baseline let's say we take 6.9 kilocalories per minute out of each of those other equations it really changes the math and you can see that I'm actually generating above my baseline much more efficiently that scoop is almost 170 jewels per kilocalorie that I burned whereas the shovel is only 159 jewels per kilocalorie so actually the scoop is then more efficient when you remove the baseline because it's so quick it's almost as quick as the snowblower okay so let's break all these numbers down and get to the bottom line what's more efficient and why and we can break it down to a couple different categories so let's look at time so if time was the only thing you were interested in let's say that it took you an hour to do something with a snowblower it would take you an hour and 19 minutes to do it with the scoop but an hour and 40 minutes to do with the shovel so obviously just on a per time basis a snowblower is quickest period the second category we can look at is labor so how difficult is each one of these and we already talked about work and the jewels and why a snowblower and a shovel have a higher energetic input in terms of you know work measured by jewels because they're throwing the snow twice as high as the scoop so that's one thing but we can also look at labor in terms of calories burned and we've kind of done that already too and we know that a snowblower is for the human body about twice as efficient as using the scoop and about three times as efficient as using the shovel but if you factor in the fossil fuels it's way less efficient most of us don't think of anything about burning a gallon of gas but it really puts in perspective how much energy is really contained in that fossil fuel if you look at it that way in a pure caloric total caloric picture the scoop is seven times more efficient than the snowblower another thing to consider is expense a snowblower like that costs about $500 and after talking with my local folks at the repair shop they say you should reckon with about $80 a year in maintenance plus a little bit of gas so operating costs every year after you buy the $500 piece of equipment it's still $80 a year and then the scoop is $50 and I checked with my dad he still has the scoop he bought when I was born in the early 80s and so I'm anticipating that my scoop that I bought for $50 should last me 20 30 years and finally the shovel might not last as long but it costs only $15 so it's easier to replace so in terms of cost the snowblower is far and away more inexpensive and I crunched the numbers and if you paid yourself $15 an hour to do this work at what point would it be more cost effective to have a snowblower if you were snowblowing here in Madison, Wisconsin where we get about 50.9 inches of snow a year if you were snowblowing a tenth of an acre you would break even in terms of cost with compared to the scoop to put that in perspective that's about plowing out half of a city block that would be about that would be about a tenth of an acre so if you're doing that much then hands down get a snowblower or if you have hard issues because people have hard attacks every year with with snow shoveling so if you have hard issues or you know some mobility issues or something like that obviously a snowblower is great but if not a scoop is probably more efficient and I know that when my neighbor is running his snowblower and I'm working there with my scoop and he goes a little quicker than I do it's hard to tell myself yeah this is actually more efficient but really when you measure it in many different ways it is and another thing to consider is clearing snow is really only a big problem if you have to clear out a driveway so you can get your car in and out and that assumes that you have a car the easiest way to cut down on clearing snow is to get rid of your car obviously for many of us it's hard to get to work we live out in the country we are obligate drivers we have to drive to get around it's just not possible especially in the winter to bike into town in a safe way both because of ice and also because of roads not being built for bikes so that that's a problem but it is worth remembering the reason that we're clearing so much snow is so that we can drive so in bringing this all together the snowblower is the most efficient on your body but not necessarily for the environment or your wallet the snow scoop is the most efficient in terms of jewels produced time and all these other factors when you consider everything I think so if it were me I'm a you know middle aged relatively fit person a snow scoop is the best solution for me but your long driveway or you know older heart or something like that might suggest a snow snow blower is best for you and the shovel I think we can all agree we should leave the shovel for the small areas that we really can't get to with a scoop or a snow blower so there you have it that's a that's comparing in a as scientific way as I can a snow blower a snow scoop and a snow shovel so please let me know your thoughts below if you have other ideas of things I should be trialing put them below I'm working on some others already I'm comparing a chainsaw and a hand saw versus a log splitter and a hand splitting for firewood and I got that going on but that's going to take me a little longer because I'm doing more iterations plus a whole bunch of other new stuff and this is a new series that we're putting out here at the low technology institute called low tech r&d we're going to trial all kinds of things like compost and tomato fertilizer egg preservation meat preservation all kinds of different subsistence type technologies hopefully as many as we can we're going to try and pull out of the past and look at pre-industrial technologies as well as non-industrial technologies today from parts of the world that are less dependent on fossil fuels and maybe there will be some things that we can adapt and start to use ourselves to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels which is what we're all about here at the low technology institute it's not about going back to the middle ages it's about using the information we've gained since the enlightenment to go forward into a world where we're not using fossil fuels or energy as intensively as we have been in the past so thanks for watching please feel free to share this reach out i'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org or you can find all of our work at lowtechinstitute.org thanks for watching