SnowfallCheck

Do you need a snowblower in Fairview Heights, IL?

The machine for a Fairview Heights driveway

A shovel is enough

A normal winter drops about 1.5 tons of snow on this driveway in Fairview Heights, 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 Fairview Heights is light enough for one.

A normal Fairview Heights winter

Snow a year
11 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
12

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 Fairview Heights

  1. Nov0.6
  2. Dec2.9
  3. Jan3.4
  4. Feb3.3
  5. Mar1.0

Snow worth clearing runs from December to March, heaviest in January. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.

Towns near Fairview Heights

Fairview Heights is number 206 of 225 Illinois towns here for snowfall; St. Charles gets the most at 46 inches.

TownMilesSnowTwo car, paved
Swansea, IL311 inA shovel is enough
O'Fallon, IL511 inA shovel is enough
Belleville, IL611 inA shovel is enough
Collinsville, IL611 inA shovel is enough
Shiloh, IL611 inA shovel is enough
East St. Louis, IL714 inA 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 Belleville Siu Rsch, 10.0 miles from Fairview Heights. 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.