Well, we got a bit of an unexpected snow storm. The usual wet snow that we typically get here in VA. I’ve been busy and haven’t had time to do any prep on the snow blower or Yarbo Core. Woke up to several inches of wet snow that was already melting on the driveway. I put the core in the garage late last night when I got home and carried the snow blower up from the basement this morning, threw it on, powered it on and totally YOLO’d it, expecting the worse.
No ceramic coating, no snow tracks, no tweaking of the plans and test runs. Just my driveway snow map from last year. I set the moving speed to medium, the auger speed to turbo, the module height to zero the safety buffer to 4 inches and yeeted Yarbo out the garage door. Yari roared to life as the white snow became black asphalt behind it. She did more plowing than blowing. When enough snow built up in front of it, sometimes you’d hear the surge of the auger having a tasty bite of the good stuff.
I expected the worse. I was totally expecting to have to go into plow mode after dealing with lots of unclogging. I am happy to say that I had only one clog and that was my fault. It stopped because it detected me watching it in the garage. I stopped videoing to check the app expecting an overcurrent. I was confused because the app said the plan was still active. Then I saw the person icon. There was a good snow pack in there gumming up the works already. When I walked away, it clogged pretty quickly. So, I reversed the auger. It cleared right away. Cycled it to turbo, reversed the auger again, disabled person detection and hit resume.
It started pointing the chute towards the garage (and me), so I paused it and closed the door. Wasn’t ready for that arctic blast to the face so early in the morning. It would’ve got me, but quickly turned the chute the right direction. I do wish that was a little more refined, but I know they’ll get it there. All in all, I expected the worse and got a cleaned driveway. I even sent it back out for a cleanup run because it did so well and didn’t clog when left alone. There were some stragglers and a bit of manual cleanup at the end of the driveway and by the garage. Even the plow truck stopped to admire the beautiful job Yari was doing. All while I sat inside watching first person view on my big screen TV. The manual cleanup took 10 mins of my time. No big deal. I could totally have programmed those too with some sidewalks. I knocked the snow off the top of the module from all the wet snow clumps Yari threw out then cute on her own, but didn’t quite make it to the ground. Parked her in the garage to thaw out and get topped off on some electron juice. All in all, a good first run of the season! Totally happy with my purchase.
I wasn’t feeling well last night and today. I ended up taking a sick day from work. I was sending pictures to my co-workers telling them how hard I was working while I was sick. They were pretty jealous and saying things like “hey send that robot my way!”.
The fact that I did everything wrong, did zero prep, and it still worked is a testament to how far this product has come. Thanks Team Yarbo!
