Same robot in July: what the snow blower does in the off-season

Most snow equipment spends nine months of the year taking up garage space. The robot doesn’t, and for a lot of our customers that’s what finally makes the math work.

One chassis, several jobs

The Yarbo platform is a self-driving tracked base — the Core — that accepts different tool modules. The Snow Blower is the winter one. Yarbo also sells a robotic mower module, a leaf blower module, and a trimmer, and bundles the mower and snow blower together at a lower combined price than buying each separately. The Core alone, with nothing attached, is rated to climb a 70 percent grade, which tells you something about how much headroom the base has when it isn’t carrying an auger.

The navigation infrastructure is shared. The RTK setup, the Data Center or NetRTK, the no-go zones around the heat pump: all of it carries over. The lawn gets its own map, because mowing a yard is a different route from clearing a driveway, but the hard part — knowing where it is — is already solved.

The swap, honestly

The Snow Blower module weighs about 77 pounds. Reviewers who’ve done the change-over solo describe it as “a bit of a chore,” and we’d agree. It’s not a tool-free click; it’s a two-person job in a garage, twice a year, plus the plow blade coming off if you’ve been running it.

Owners’ consensus is that the Core itself lives outside year-round — it’s IPX5-rated and built for it — while whichever module isn’t in use waits in the garage.

Why this is easy for Zippy Lawnz customers

Zippy Lawnz has been installing and managing robotic mowers for years, which is the whole reason Zippy Snow exists. So the seasonal swap isn’t a chore we hand you; it’s a crew visit. In the spring close-out the snow module comes off, gets cleaned and greased, and goes into storage; the mower goes on and the lawn map gets checked. In the fall, the reverse. One robot, one crew, one app, two seasons.

If you’re already a Zippy Lawnz mowing customer, your existing Core may be the base for winter clearing. If you’re a snow customer first, the mowing side is a conversation for April. Either way, the plans work the same way in both seasons: managed, or owned with us on call.

What it means for the price

A gas snow blower is a $1,500 machine you use eight times a year. The robot is a bigger number that earns its keep in every month with grass or snow in it. We go through the actual numbers, region by region, in what a robot really costs against a plow contract.