There has been lots of great progress on the lawn mowing capabilities of Yarbo this summer and I’m enjoying all of those.
However, I’m in the Ottawa, Canada area and we will certainly have snow falls within the next 3 months.
I’m curious what enhancements are being planned for the snowblower capabilities of Yarbo for this coming snow season?
Thanks,
Scott
Does anyone remember an carry over requests from last winter? I wasn’t around for the snow season.
When the unit is adjusting the chute disengage the auger so that it doesn’t blast snow into an area not designated as a snow throw area. Ex. While next to the street dont throw ice chunks into oncoming traffic.
We have an internal list of feature requests and optimizations collected from last snow season, and our product team will be working on improvements based on that list. If there are any specific features you or other community members are particularly interested in, I’d be happy to bring those suggestions to our product team for discussion.
This was indeed one of the biggest concern for me as well. Instead of traffic I had my own house windows to worry about. Not cool.
The second problem I was facing was the problem where to install extra weight. Yarbo needs to be about double in its weight to be effective when operating on uneven ground and wet snow conditions. Someone here on the forum posted a picture how he is using the tow hitch and some gym weights attached to it. This looked like a great idea for winter. Just need to make sure to leave enough space for turning afterwards.
As snowblower do not need to go under low hanging trees in my yard I might design and print 3d bracket to install the extra weight on top of Yarbo where the battery is. Then the core still will have same external dimensions and therefore would not damage anything I own with the tow hitch when turning.
The most important thing with using also any other snowblower is to spray regularly the silicon based lubricant inside the snowblower module and inside the shoot. I think I had only 1-2 clogging related issues last winter. This stuff really helps. I also used the same stuff on the winter tracks.
And i also use the same stuff for the mower module. The grass buildup is not so severe and just light water is only now needed to clean the cuttindeck
Hi. I don’t have the snow blower as I use Yarbo in my summer house (where I live during the summer season). However, during winter, I hire someone to snow blow the entryway (fire department mandatory) and it costs me a crap load of money. I could setup the Yarbo snow blower, but my worry is that it would get stuck in the entryway and I would not be there for a few days/weeks to get it unstuck.
In your experience, how often does the blower get stuck? Can it run with minimal-to-none human intervention (and remote intervention?)
Despite me complaining quite a abit about some bugs, I did not intervene on my lawn mower for at least 5 weeks now (Except the reboots that I can fix with a remote switch and the blade switch / lubrication ). Do you think it is too wild to hope for the snowblower to work independtly for 2-3 weeks without physical maintenance? Or at this point it needs human intervention?
Also, how about the bump in front of the parkway left by the snowplow? Is Yarbo able to deal with it? @Yarbo-Forum @ken.w.gregory
That one seems reasonable!
I also have the Yarbo set up in the summerhouse. I don’t live there full time.
It needed some care over the winter. Especially on the times when it really snowed heavily and wet snow. This reason Yarbo needs to be a lot heavier. It has the torque needed and adding additional weight made things so much better. I used ratchet straps and some sandbags. Wasn’t great setup but it helped. With gym weight I can make the darn thing much heavier then before. As it runs on slowest speed and outside is cold I think it will be ok for Yarbo motors to handle the extra weight.
I did also brake some locking pins on the auger. It was my mistake to think that I could run the snowblower on the lowest hight setting while my ground is uneven and driveway is made out of gravel. Lessons where learned and with small tweaks Yarbo was autonomously clearing the snow at least a month in the end of last winter. It wasn’t snowing that much also at the end but was notmal winter conditions
I live in the Buffalo, NY area and from what I’ve heard we get a little bit more snow than most.
This really depends. I got my snowblower in January and we already had about 2 to 3 feet of fluffy snow. The SB struggled in some tasks, which was expected. It was able to clear the main driveway without issue (I didn’t expect that) but it kept getting stuck trying to clear the sidewalk and in no way could it cut through the snowplow dump at the end of the driveway.
Sidewalk issue: it was able to clear the snow but it kept getting stuck trying to come back. The issue was there would be 2 - 3 ft banks on each side and on it’s way back it would drift into the banks and get stuck. I had to manually reposition the unit to get it unstuck. I tried doing it via the remote but was unsuccessful.
Snowplow pile issue: The snow left at the end of the driveway is usually hard compacted ice and snow. I struggle sometimes with my Ariens to get through this and Yarbo didn’t stand a chance. It didn’t get stuck but would just spin the tracks trying to get through. Whether or not it can clear this is dependent on the amount and type dumped there. Throughout the winter it was sometimes able to clear it and other times it couldn’t.
With that being said if you have it go out often, every 2 - 4 inches it seems to work fine but I still don’t send mine out unattended; I just don’t trust it enough. The idea was to send it out in the morning to clear the end of the driveway so my daughter could go to work without me getting up at 5am to clear it myself. If it’s not cleared there’s a good chance the car will get stuck backing out.
I have the driveway broken down into three areas Main, Entry and Snowplow. This is so I could play around with how and where the snow was being thrown, see below.
My biggest concern is the way the chute logic works. It would literally throw snow and ice chunks into the street which have hit cars as they went by. It would also throw snow into the garage if the door is open. If cars were parked in the driveway, which there are most of the time, it would throw snow onto them (I marked the cars with NGZ). This happened even though the designated snow pile areas were well defined. The problem is while the chute is being rotated the auger is still turning and the core is still moving forward. During this process snow is being expelled from the chute.
It does work fairly well most of the time but still has some issues to be worked out.
Could it do what you are asking? Potentially. Would I trust it to work completely unattended? No.
My snow blower has seen zero snow. I won’t be able to provide any guidance. Maybe next summer I’ll have some experience. But I hope not. Not a fan of snow… 
I’d rather be on the beach while it snows in Ohio.
Hi @Yarbo-Forum - How are the plans coming along to have multiple modules exist cleanly on the same map when there are Area overlaps? As you may recall, my snowblower Areas across my property are now buried under mower Areas – so a lot of Areas are overlapped – and as a result I can no longer update things like Pathways. Nor do I know how the old Pathways will behave, as they’re now in overlaps. I’ve already had to delete one Pathway originally used by the snowblower, and I don’t know how I’m going to re-create it, as the endpoint Area is completely overlapped now.
I was told that there are some ideas floating around for this on the Development team (new ways to handle Pathways, “filtering” maps by module, etc). Is there an update?
Any chance you could post the list and let the community vote on priority?
Just a thought. I totally understand a corporation’s desire to not air the dirty underwear.
I added a suggestion to the board specifically to solve issues like this.
Please feel free to vote for it. I think this needs to be resolved ASAP. Right now, there are too many modules all trying to use the same map space and it’s messing things up
I’ve checked with our product team, and we’re currently designing a label feature that will help separate the map by module. While I can’t share specific details at this time, I can confirm that this feature is already in the development stage.
I’m sorry, but we don’t have plans to post such a list at the moment. Every “like” you give to a feature request post is already counted in our internal list, and our team does refer to that data when evaluating feature priorities. That said, we truly appreciate your suggestion.