Do you need a snowblower in Asheville, NC?
Your answer for Asheville
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 1.5 tons of snow on this driveway in Asheville, spread over a few light falls. That is shovel work.
Get a wide plastic shovel with a bent handle before the first fall, and if you have a bad back, consider a cordless single-stage instead: the snow in Asheville is light enough for one.
A normal Asheville winter
- Snow a year
- 12 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.3 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- almost never
- Days with snow on the ground
- 7
Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 3.3 times as much. It tends to stay, so each storm lands on the last one.
On a two car driveway that is about 1.5 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in Asheville
- Nov0.5
- Dec2.7
- Jan3.8
- Feb2.2
- Mar2.0
- Apr0.3
Snow worth clearing runs from December to March, heaviest in January. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
Asheville and its neighbours
Asheville is number 2 of 91 North Carolina towns here for snowfall; Boone gets the most at 26 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hendersonville, NC | 18 | 7 in | A shovel is enough |
| Waynesville, NC | 26 | 11 in | A shovel is enough |
| Greeneville, TN | 44 | 8 in | A shovel is enough |
| Greer, SC | 48 | 4 in | A shovel is enough |
| Morganton, NC | 49 | 5 in | A shovel is enough |
| Greenville, SC | 52 | 4 in | A shovel is enough |
Where these numbers come from
Read next: What a winter of snow weighs and Why storm depth matters more than snowfall.
NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals from Asheville, 1.7 miles from Asheville. A normal winter, not this winter's forecast. Snow is weighed at 6.24 pounds a cubic foot, fresh and fairly dry; wet spring snow can weigh three times that.