The accessories that matter are the ones that decide whether clearing your driveway is a ten minute job or a miserable half hour. Most of them cost very little and almost nobody buys them until their second winter.
Covers
A snow blower stored outdoors or in an unheated garage goes through the dew point every night, and that cycle rusts the auger housing from the inside. A fitted cover is the single cheapest thing you can do to extend the life of the machine.
Look for a breathable cover rather than a sealed plastic sheet. A fully waterproof cover with no ventilation traps condensation underneath and accelerates exactly the rust you were trying to prevent. Elasticated hems and a strap under the housing stop it becoming a sail in a January wind.
Cabs and windshields
A cab transforms a two stage machine in open country. You are walking into thrown snow and whatever the wind hands back, and on an exposed rural property that is the difference between finishing the job properly and finishing it quickly.
Most cabs are a tubular frame with clear panels that clamp to the handlebars. Check fitment against your handle design before buying, since machines with folding handles or unusual control layouts do not always accept universal cabs. Visibility in a whiteout is the main reason people remove them again, so look for panels that can be rolled or unzipped rather than fixed.
Tyre chains and traction
Chains are the cheapest performance upgrade in the category. A two stage machine drives through its wheels, and on packed ice those wheels simply spin. Chains restore the drive that the machine was designed to have.
Match chains to your tyre size exactly. Too loose and they work off, too tight and they stress the axle. Fit them before the first freeze rather than trying to wrestle them on in a storm. If your driveway slopes at all, treat chains as essential rather than optional.
Drift cutters
Drift cutters are vertical blades that bolt to the sides of the auger housing and slice down through snow taller than the intake, collapsing it into the machine instead of letting it spill over the sides. On the Prairies and anywhere that drifts, they turn an impossible bite into an ordinary one.
Many two stage machines ship with them in the box and owners never fit them. If you have drifting, fit them.
Skid shoes and scraper bars
These are consumables, not accessories, but they are the parts most often left worn far past their service life. The scraper bar is the metal strip along the bottom of the housing that determines how cleanly the machine finishes a pass. When it wears, you leave a layer of snow behind on every pass and typically blame the engine.
Skid shoes set the auger height. On gravel they should hold the auger roughly 25mm clear of the surface. On smooth pavement they can sit lower. Polymer skid shoes wear more slowly than steel on abrasive surfaces and do not mark interlock.
Handle warmers and lights
Heated grips are inexpensive, draw very little current, and change how long you are willing to keep working. Most clearing happens before dawn or after dark, so a decent LED light kit matters more than people expect. Machines fitted with a single dim incandescent lamp benefit enormously from an upgrade.
The clearing tool
Every snow blower ships with a plastic clearing tool for the chute, and it is the most frequently lost item on the machine. It is also the one that prevents the injuries this category is known for.
Never clear a chute or auger housing with your hand, engine off or not. The auger and impeller store rotational energy and can turn suddenly when a blockage releases. If your tool is missing, replace it before the next storm. They cost very little and there is no substitute.
What to buy first
If you are starting from nothing, in order of value: the clearing tool if yours is missing, a spare set of shear pins, tyre chains if you have any slope, a cover if the machine lives outdoors, and drift cutters if you get drifting. That set costs very little and covers most of what actually goes wrong or makes the job unpleasant.
Browse snow blower parts for wear items, or see the repair guide for what typically fails and when.
Fuel stabiliser and why it matters more than anything else here
More snow blowers fail to start because of fuel than every other cause combined. Modern petrol containing ethanol begins to degrade within about thirty days, and over an eight month off season it varnishes inside the carburettor bowl and blocks the jets.
Stabiliser costs very little and prevents the single most common and most expensive service call in the category. Add it to every fill through the season, not just before storage, because a machine that sits three weeks between storms is already in the window where fuel starts to go off.
If you prefer not to think about it, ethanol free fuel sold in cans is shelf stable for years. It costs considerably more per litre, but for a machine that burns a few litres a season it is a reasonable trade and removes the problem entirely.
Shear pins, and buying the right ones
Shear pins are engineered to break at a specific load so the auger gearbox survives an impact. They are the cheapest part on the machine and the one people most often substitute incorrectly.
A hardware store bolt of the same diameter will not shear at the same load. It will hold, and the gearbox will absorb the impact instead, turning a two dollar failure into a repair that frequently exceeds the value of an older machine. Buy the pins specified for your model, keep a set of at least four in the garage, and keep the correct nuts with them.
Storage stands and lifts
Storing a machine directly on a concrete floor wicks moisture up into the auger housing and the underside of the frame. A pallet, a purpose built stand or even two lengths of timber lifts it clear and makes a measurable difference to how it looks after five summers.
For attachments that mount to a quad or tractor, a wheeled dolly is worth building or buying. Mounting a 120kg blower is a two person job otherwise, and the number of owners who stop using an attachment because mounting is a hassle is higher than manufacturers would like to admit.
Chute deflector upgrades
The deflector at the top of the chute controls how far the snow travels. On basic machines it is set with a wingnut and stays where you put it, which means you either throw far and risk hitting a window, or throw short and clear the same snow twice.
Remote deflector kits let you adjust pitch from the handlebars. On machines that already have remote chute rotation but manual deflector control, this is usually the missing half of a useful system and is worth adding.
Wheel weights and ballast
Two stage machines drive through their wheels, and traction depends on weight over those wheels. Bolt on wheel weights are inexpensive and improve drive on packed surfaces, particularly on lighter machines that skate rather than pull.
Weights and chains solve related but different problems. Chains give you grip on ice. Weight gives you the load needed to use that grip. On a sloped driveway you generally want both.
Marker stakes
Driveway markers are trivially cheap and prevent the two most annoying kinds of damage: clipping the edge of a lawn with the auger, and running into something buried under a drift. Fit them in October along the edges of the driveway and around anything you would rather not hit, including septic risers, garden beds and low walls.
Fibreglass rods are better than wooden stakes because they flex rather than snap and survive being struck.
What not to bother with
A few accessories sell well and deliver little. Aftermarket chute liners marketed to stop clogging make marginal difference compared with simply not overloading the machine in wet snow. Universal cabs that do not properly fit your handle design will rattle themselves apart in one season. And oversized aftermarket impellers that promise longer throw generally just load the engine harder for a modest gain.
Spend the money on chains, a cover, a correct set of shear pins and a decent light kit. Those four make a real difference every single time you use the machine.
Common questions
Do I need a snow blower cover?
Are tyre chains worth it?
What are drift cutters for?
Can I use a regular bolt as a shear pin?
Setting up a new machine properly
An hour spent on a new snow blower in October saves considerably more than that across a winter. Work through it in this order.
Check the oil. Many machines ship dry or with shipping oil only. Starting one without oil destroys the engine in minutes, and it is the most expensive mistake possible on day one.
Set skid shoe height for your surface. On gravel, hold the auger roughly 25mm clear. On smooth pavement you can run lower for a cleaner finish. Set both sides identically or the machine will pull.
Check tyre pressures. Machines frequently arrive with uneven pressures, which makes them wander and wears the scraper bar unevenly.
Fit the clearing tool where you can reach it. Most machines have a clip. Use it, because the tool you left in the garage is the tool you will be tempted to do without.
Run it for ten minutes on dry ground. Engage the auger, cycle the chute through its full rotation, test the drive in every gear, and confirm the controls reach comfortably with winter gloves on. Gloves change what you can grip and operate more than people expect.
Storing accessories so you can find them
The chains, drift cutters and spare shear pins you bought in October are useless if they are behind eight months of garage accumulation in January. Keep the winter kit together in one labelled box near the machine: shear pins and nuts, a spare belt, a spare plug, the clearing tool, chains, and the correct spanner for the auger bolts.
It is a five minute job that turns a storm night repair from an hour of searching into a ten minute fix.
Shipping and availability
Accessories ship as parcels rather than freight, so they arrive far faster than a machine and are worth ordering ahead of the season. Wear items in particular sell out nationally after the first significant storm, which is exactly when everybody discovers their scraper bar is worn through.
Everything on this page ships across every province and territory, priced in Canadian dollars.
One habit that saves an accessory purchase
Run the machine for a minute at the end of every clearing before putting it away. It clears residual snow from the auger housing and chute that would otherwise freeze overnight into a solid block. It costs a minute, saves fifteen minutes of chipping the next morning, and does more for reliability than most of the things people buy to fix the problem afterwards.