Why Using a Vacuum Cleaner to Remove Snow Is a Bad Idea
Surf the Internet long enough and you’ll see life hacks that will supposedly change your life. Everything in your pantry has a secret and surprising off-label use, and every annoying chore you have on your to-do list can be simplified with a little creativity (and maybe some pool noodles ).
But not all hacks are on the same level. There are some truly innovative ideas that definitely add value to your daily life, but some techniques are really just alternative ways of doing tasks that don’t add much benefit, and some even make things more difficult.
For example, if you live in an area of the country that gets a lot of snow every year, you may have looked at the calendar and realized that winter is coming, and with it, snow that needs to be cleared away. If you’re looking for life hacks, you may have read that using a wet-dry vacuum in your garage to suck up snow will make your life easier. While this will technically work, it likely won’t make your life or the snow removal process any easier. In fact, it will actively make the situation worse.
Using a vacuum cleaner to remove snow is too slow.
Clearing or even blowing snow off your property and sidewalks can be tedious as it is—if you have a large area to clear, you’ll be spending hours there stomping your feet and cursing the weather. So the idea of magically vacuuming white things might seem brilliant. But clearing snow will take you much longer.
If you have a larger vacuum cleaner with a wider nozzle, it may work a little faster. But you’ll also have to deal with different types of snow cover: light, fluffy snow may be easier to suck in, while dense, wet snow will be a slow, grinding process.
A wet/dry vacuum cleaner full of snow is too heavy.
Let’s say you have a powerful vacuum cleaner with a huge attachment that can quickly handle even the slushiest snow. Big! If you have a regular wet/dry vacuum with a capacity of about 12 gallons, you’ll fill it up quickly . Even if you have a huge 30-gallon wet/dry vacuum, you won’t go far before you have to stop vacuuming, open the vacuum, and dump the snow.
And the large capacity also means your wet/dry vacuum will be heavy. There’s a reason many people have heart attacks while shoveling snow: it’s hard, hard stuff. Depending on its density, snow can weigh about 20 pounds per cubic foot, and this 30-gallon vacuum can hold about four cubic feet of material. So at full power you’re hauling 80 pounds of snow and then throwing it out. Repeatedly. Even a 12-gallon wet-dry vacuum has about 1.5 cubic feet of volume, so you’re lugging around 30 pounds of snow.
A wet-dry vacuum cleaner will not cope with ice.
If you walk out your door to a winter wonderland of dry, fluffy snow, you might be able to vacuum it up. And if you’re determined to be cool and avant-garde and use a vacuum cleaner, you can chew your way through thick, wet snow. But your wet-dry vacuum will do absolutely nothing on snow that has been trampled by passing pedestrians or frozen into solid ice due to extremely cold temperatures.
Yes, this is also the problem that you face when using a snow blower, but a snow blower at least has the advantage of being a faster and more efficient tool for this purpose, even if you have to go back to working with a scraper or some other tool. or another tool. the ice is melting. And if you dig with a shovel, you can scrape off that rock ice as you go.
Put these three factors together and you get a slow and grueling process that stops feeling like a hack after about half an hour. Will it work? Yes, it will work. Your wet/dry vacuum does a great job of sucking up this snow. What’s better than shoveling or blowing snow (or hiring local boys to do it for you)? Probably no. So it’s not that much of a hack.
We would all like to find a way to make the snow disappear from our sidewalks, porches and yards. Someday science may hear our prayers. For now, leave your wet/dry vacuum in the store and get to cleaning.