Mapping suggestions from those with more experience than me.

Yarbo Product Talk Yarbo Snowblower
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I’m looking for guidance, suggestions and best practices before I map my primary driveway with my Yarbo Snow Blower.

It’s a pretty basic concrete driveway. It is pretty flat and there are no cracks or missing pieces of concrete. I wouldn’t expect this to be much of a challenge for Yarbo.

Driveway
Driveway1650×872 164 KB

Looking at the image you are facing North-ish. Winter storms typically come from the West or Southwest.

Driveway is about 60 feet long by about 23 feet wide. Turn around is about 10 feet x 20 feet.

There is a sidewalk that goes from the driveway to the front porch and is curved and about 40 inches wide.

Suggestions:
First bring in the trashcan. I got that one.
Any other suggestions?

If this has all been documented somewhere before, please point me there.

Some questions:
How close to the garage door should I map?
When I map, should I run the tracks on the edge of the concrete or let them hang off into the grass somewhat? (is there a Yarbo enforced setback like is currently in place on the mower?)
Should I map the turn around separately? Would doing so provide more control on where the snow gets blown? Or just map it as one area and let Yarbo figure it out?
Should I blow the snow Westward to create a snow berm? Or just send it Eastward?
Any thoughts on how high to set the scraper blade.

What else am I missing?

What gotchas and I missing?

What kit (spare parts) should I keep on hand?

I know the answer to this question will vary based on type of snow, (Wet heavy snow likely takes longer), but what is your best guess on time to clear the driveway.

There are two other driveways on my property. There is an asphalt driveway to the east of this picture and a gravel driveway to the west of this picture. They are not a priority at this point, but maybe someday I’ll map them too.

How much clearance do you need for gravel? I guess if Yarbo starts slinging gravel I should probably raise it some. :wink:

Thank you in advance for the great guidance I’m sure I will receive from the Yarbo Community.

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I’ll defer to @Ken here who has way more experience with the snow blower than I do.

Map it with the snow blower and test it with your height set as high as you can go. For gravel you’ll want to set it up a few inches for sure.

Make sure you pay attention to the snow throw area and try to keep it to one side if you can because it tracks the chute parallel to the line. If you select both sides of the driveway it can get weird with the path planning and throwing. Also likes to swing the chute between the lines and throws it sometimes while moving it.

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I think you’re doing the right thing by planning for the snow blowing now.

Definitely build your plans with the snowblower attached. You can’t set things up properly with out it being attached.

I did my ‘turnaround area’ as a separate zone, because sometimes my kids’ cars will be parked there.

Just like with the yard, set up the driveway zones, then do practice runs and keep iterating the design until you have it dialed in just right.

I did a driveway perimeter ‘zone’ to give Yarbo a clear area for its turnarounds. I also separately set up a zone for the end of the driveway work for when the snowplow comes and dumps more snow.

You can test your zones without the auger spinning. Yarbo will just pretend to blow snow and you can watch what it’s doing and like I said, adjust your boundaries.

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If you do your driveway as one single area, Yarbo will solve it by primarily going from the garage to the street. That’ll cause a problem when you reach the street, as the chute picks which side to throw toward.

Instead, do the apron (at the road) as a separate area, probably 10 feet deep, total.
Doing so will allow you to do that apron in a zigzag that is 100% left-to-right.
You’ll have the choice to make the cute will always face forward, or better you can make the cute always face toward the house, away from the road. There will be little to no risk of the chute blowing snow and rocks onto a passing car’s windshield. You’ll snowblow anything that lands on the rest of the driveway, later.

Whereever the town plow bank usually starts, probably get near enough to the street that the task can take a bite out of it, but if you get snow like we do, no snowblower will touch it if you get dumped on. I had mine punch through it, but over the long term it won’t be worth the shear pins.

The rest of the driveway is cut up however you’d like. Overlap the areas into each other, a little, so that they can be used as turning points. I had it do the apron first, then work back from that.

Cars will need to be put somewhere as areas get done. Cut up your areas to allow for that. As you define your areas, be certain to manage your chute directions according to where the cars will be. Yarbo WILL occasionally spit snow as the core rotates if you do not manage that behavior (hence the dedicated apron, above).

Frozen tire tracks or footprints WILL happen, and they will push the core off-course. Do not count on threading a needle between cars unless you own a paint shop.

Don’t forget to include a curb-side area for the weekly garbage bin pickup.

Yarbo snowblows over grass and gravel just fine if you keep the height up. What the snowblower does not like is traversing across uneven terrain. It can snowblow along a high/low swale or shallow rut, ___/ but will not do well trying to cross one - the scraper will dive into the climb-out side as the tracks hit the downhill side. The core will eventually figure it out, but you’ll be burning a lot of time, icing up the driveway, and leaving several inches of snow in those areas. It works better if you set your pathing to go along any ruts or low spots.

The docking station can be terrifying. Manage chute direction and height according to windows that you wish to keep. Do some dry-runs with the auger off, and PROVE that the chute will never sweep toward a window.

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I did find some Helpful Alternative Custom Kludge Solutions to help with snowblowing, and I probably made Tips a while ago but will do so coming up. I may have even put some in the Wiki? (There’s a TL;DR snowblower section in the Big README that not even I read.)

And Yarbo introduced new features that I will DEFINITELY want to use, and I suspect I’ll be doing some re-mapping. The new stuff arrived too late for me at the end of the snow season.

The difficulty is with the folks who have mapped for the snowblower and then mapped over that for the mower, creating overlaps. Pathways (and probably Sidewalks) are made problematic. There’s a proposed solution, but I’ve not seen an update in months.

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Do you recall what the new features were?

Trying to decide if I want to avoid them for the short term. :wink:

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  • Sidewalk with reverse (so like a Deadend, no turn at the end)
  • Slope Mode for snowblower Areas → This one’s VERY interesting. I just hope I didn’t imagine it. I will re-map the end of my driveway if this feature is there.
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You didn’t imagine it. Those features look to work very well from what I’ve seen.

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