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Job summary. Difficulty: moderate, and mostly about timing and bite size rather than strength. Time: 15 to 40 minutes for a typical bank once the driveway itself is clear, longer if the bank has frozen. Tools: your snowblower, its clean out tool, a shovel for the edges the machine cannot reach, and spare shear pins within reach. Hire a pro line: a bank that has melted and refrozen into solid ice, on a driveway you must open for a medical or work deadline, belongs to a clearing service with heavier equipment, not to a homeowner machine forced into it.

First, is the bank yours to clear?

On eligible Toronto residential streets, a specialized machine follows the snow plows and clears a three metre wide opening at the end of the driveway. The City aims to finish that opening within two hours of the road being plowed, and the timing depends on the size of the route, how much snow has built up, on street parking, and other obstructions. On collector and arterial roads the same three metre opening is cleared only when the windrow exceeds 25 centimetres. Windrows are cleared only when they result from street plowing, so snow you pushed to the apron yourself does not qualify.

That changes the first decision. If your street is eligible and the plow has only just passed, the city opening may still be on its way, and the smart move is to clear your own driveway, wait out the two hour aim, and then finish whatever the opening left behind. If your street is not eligible, or the opening has already been cut and the rest of the bank still blocks a second vehicle, the bank is yours now. Other municipalities run different rules or none at all, so check your own city program before assuming either way. Toronto residents can read the current service levels on the City site, linked in the sources below.

One more timing fact shapes the wait. Toronto starts plowing residential streets at 8 centimetres of accumulation, and a full residential plowing round takes about 14 hours. In a long storm the plow may pass more than once, and each pass rebuilds the bank. Clearing in step with the plow, rather than once at the end, is the pattern the rest of this guide assumes.

What a plow bank is, and why the clock matters

A plow bank, also called a windrow, is not driveway snow that happens to sit at the end. The plow blade is angled, so it scrapes snow off the street and rolls it continuously to the side as it travels. Your driveway opening is a gap in the curb line, and the snow rolling off the blade fills that gap with everything the blade collected along the front of your property and the properties before yours. That is why the bank is deeper, wetter, and far more compacted than the snow that fell on your driveway, and why a machine that handled the driveway easily can struggle at the apron.

Compaction is only half the problem. The other half is the melt and refreeze cycle. Consumer Reports puts the instruction plainly: tackle the plow drift right away, before it melts, refreezes, and becomes rock hard. A fresh bank is heavy but workable. The same bank after a sunny afternoon and a cold night is an ice structure, and ice is where shear pins, belts, and patience go to die. Every hour of delay raises the difficulty of this job more than any technique lowers it.

Before the next plow pass: the pocket, with the viewpoint fixed

The prevention trick for the next bank is widely shared and widely garbled, because the directions flip depending on where the writer is standing. Stated with the viewpoint fixed, it works like this. Stand in the street and look at your house. Clear an area approximately ten feet wide to the right of your driveway, along the curb. That cleared area is a pocket. As the plow travels past, the snow rolling off its blade unloads into the pocket first, so less of it is still on the blade when the blade reaches your driveway opening. Then pile the snow you clear from the end of your driveway on the left side, for the same reason in reverse: a pile on the approach side gets picked up and carried straight back across your entrance.

Read any other version of this advice against that viewpoint before following it. A guide that says clear to the left may be describing the same pocket from the opposite viewpoint, standing at the house looking out at the street. A guide that does not name a viewpoint at all cannot be followed safely, because left from the street and left from the house are opposite sides, and clearing the wrong side builds the bigger bank.

The pocket has honest limits, and municipal sources name them. It works best when it is cut just after a storm and before the plow is expected on your street, and some cities publish plow trackers that make that timing possible. During ongoing heavy snow, with plows passing again and again, the pocket fills and the advantage shrinks. On a dense street the ten feet may belong to a neighbour, and clearing into it without asking just moves the problem. And the drivers themselves cannot rescue you case by case: city guidance is explicit that plow operators cannot stop, lift, or tilt the blade for every driveway, because doing so leaves a pile in the road and slows the whole route. Banks at driveway entrances are, in the same guidance, unavoidable. The pocket reduces yours. It does not eliminate it.

Tools and setup for the bank itself

Before the first bite, walk the bank. Look for the buried newspaper, the branch, the chunk of curb ice, and the recycling bin the plow may have folded into it. A snowblower can hurl small stones 30 feet or farther, and a bank concentrates exactly the debris the street collected. Children and pets go indoors for this job, every time.

Planned step images for this guide: the pocket cleared along the curb on the approach side of the driveway; the first top cut taken off a fresh bank at the slowest speed; a two foot slot opened through the bank with the rest still standing. Each image belongs at its step, showing the exact ground the step names.

The layered clearing procedure

  1. Start in the clear. Engage the auger on already cleared pavement beside the bank, not inside it. Dropping the auger into a frozen bank at full bite is how shear pins snap.
  2. Set the slowest speed. Bank work is done at the slowest drive speed the machine offers, worked very slowly. Speed is what turns dense snow into a stall or a clog.
  3. Take the top down first. Work the top and the edges of the bank before the base. Narrow bites from the top reduce the mass the auger has to lift at once, and each bite makes the next one smaller.
  4. Press the nose in, do not skim. As you approach the pile, lift up on the handles so the nose of the machine presses down into the snow. That lets the auger dig into the mass instead of riding up and skimming across the top, which polishes a fresh bank into a harder one.
  5. Open a slot, then widen it. Clear a couple of feet of bank, blowing the snow into your yard, then move over and repeat. A slot about one car width wide gets a vehicle out and matches the opening the city program itself aims for. Widen it only after the slot is through.
  6. Use partial passes in the deep sections. Where the bank is deepest, take half width passes. If the snow is deeper than the intake, raise the machine slightly and make a first top cut, then come back and clear the rest at ground level.
  7. Clear every clog the one safe way. Engine off, wait for all movement to stop, key removed where your machine has one, and the clean out tool does the work. A bank clogs more often than flat snow does, so expect this step and budget the minutes for it.
  8. Finish the edges by shovel. The curb corners and the strip beside a parked car are shovel work. Forcing the blower into them risks the curb, the car, and the auger in one motion.

What success looks like: a slot at least one car width wide cut cleanly to pavement through the full depth of the bank, with the discharged snow sitting in your yard rather than on the street or the sidewalk, the machine never having been rammed into the bank, and the shear pins still the ones you started with. If a car can leave and re-enter without climbing, the job is done, even if the outer edges of the bank still stand.

When to stop and switch tools

Some banks are outside what a homeowner machine should be asked to do, and the honest guide says so. Single stage machines typically handle snow up to about 6 to 9 inches deep, and even the strongest machines struggle once snow passes about 16 inches. A plow bank routinely exceeds both figures in height, and its density is worse than fallen snow at the same depth. A single stage machine can nibble a fresh, low bank at the edges. A tall or refrozen bank is two stage work, shovel and ice breaker work in layers, or a service call.

Stop conditions, plainly: the bank has refrozen into ice the auger rides over instead of biting; you have broken a second shear pin in the same bank; the machine repeatedly stalls at the slowest speed on partial passes; or you are tempted to ram. Ramming is the signal, not the solution. Break a frozen crust with the shovel first, let a service open the slot, or wait for a thaw hour and work the softened top down then.

Three mistakes that make the next bank worse

Piling your cleared snow on the approach side. Snow stacked where the plow blade is still loaded gets carried straight back across your entrance on the next pass. Pile on the far side, with the viewpoint rule from the pocket section, and your own snow stops volunteering.

Blowing bank snow back onto the street. It feels like the fastest landing zone and it is the worst one. Street snow is exactly what the plow is travelling to collect, and municipal guidance warns that snow deposited on the street ends up pushed back into the driveway. Into the yard, with the wind, every pass.

Waiting for the weekend. A bank cleared the day the plow built it is heavy work. The same bank after two melt and refreeze cycles is demolition. The two hour window the city aims for on its own openings is a useful personal standard too: the closer your clearing follows the plow, the smaller this job stays.

, Tom Reilly, Home & DIY Writer

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