I really appreciate the insights and advice, folks. There are a lot of questions, so I'll try to cover them in groups instead of individually. I'm also attaching some photos of the driveway. We had a Cat 930K come yesterday to deal with our plow piles, and a sand truck came today. Two of the photos are before the Cat came, one photo is after the Cat but before the sand, and one is with the sand down.
I wouldn't necessarily call 6" a normal snowfall--sometimes it's sometimes 1" or 2", sometimes 8", sometimes in between. It's not often much more than 6", and it would be very rare (less than once per winter) to get more than 16" in a day. We're on the east side of the mountains, so the snow is usually dry. I used 6" as the guideline because it's usually less than that, and the handful of times per year it's more than 6" I'm not averse to spending extra time blowing at a slower speed (as opposed to spending a lot of money on a monster tractor that can blow any amount of snow at 3 mph). Snow drifts are uncommon. We've had the property three years--the past two winters have been mild, and this winter is closer to normal. This winter is the first time we've had a problem with ice buildup. In previous winters the driving surface was usually snow, but good snow tires were always sufficient (blizzaks on the car, hakkas on the truck). Sunny days and ground heat would reduce the mass, and cold clear nights would cause frost growth on the surface.
Our plow driver had a V-plow and got stuck with some frequency (taking an hour+ to get unstuck). His equipment (truck, tires, chains) weren't the best, but he was experienced. He quit on us this weekend after getting stuck badly and missing other clients (I don't blame him, an unfortunate situation); we'll see how the next plow driver does. No matter how good the plow driver is, on high-volume winters the piles will eventually require machinery. I don't want to go through the learning curve of plowing on a high-consequence driveway, I don't want to deal with plow piles during the winter, some places (especially around the house) don't have good places to put piles, I don't like the extra driveway mud from plow piles in the spring melt, and I want the flexibility to leave the big snowfalls to blow in one pass instead of waking up in the middle of the night to do an intermediate pass. For all those reasons, I want to blow instead of plow. And perhaps silly, but I prefer the aesthetics of a blown driveway compared to plow piles. Captain Dirty, your point about keeping a plow contractor while I learn the ropes is well-taken. The sand today was delivered today at a good price and without fuss, so maybe that's the last job I'd try to take on myself.
We have ~100 acres, but almost entirely steeply hilled. I have no desire to farm or otherwise touch most of it. Around the house we have a few acres to landscape/etc, but I can manage that mowing with my BCS. The tractor is primarily for winter snow removal, and the only summer activities are moving heavy things with the loader, and maintaining the driveway (box blade, land plane, or similar). I certainly have no high-horsepower requirements in the summer. If it weren't for the snow removal, I'd probably buy an old lower-hp open-station tractor with a decent loader for the summer tasks.
The advice here seems to be to definitely aim higher than the Kubota B/Kioti CK series. There are a few youtubers with extensive collections of front-blower videos. In particular, Mark Holbrook's channel has a lot of videos with a front blower on a Kubota
L4760 in Idaho, which should be fairly similar to my climate (albeit with more drifts). He seems to move at a decent pace when blowing 6", and so I'm using that setup as a benchmark in my head. Based on that benchmark, is upgrading the hp to the
L6060 going to come with a noticeable increase in blowing pace? (sounds like going with the high HP is a good idea) And is switching from Kubota L to Kioti DK without changing the HP or blower width going to have similar performance? (not sure)
Leonz, your recommendation to use a row crop tractor while rear facing is definitely interesting. I had seen that such tractors exist, but assumed they were so astronomically expensive that it wouldn't make sense given the lack of summer use. I would appreciate the rear steer so that the wheels more closely follow the path of the blower. In addition to the cost, I'd be worried about the ease of operation/maintenance of a used tractor engineered for large farms compared to a Kubota Grand L built with less experienced owners in mind.
fishhead, your story about sliding on a 20% slope with v-bar chains on all four tires certainly got my attention. Were those cross-link chains or a web/net-style like Aquiline Talon or Trygg SMT? How heavy was that tractor?
View attachment 685221View attachment 685222View attachment 685223View attachment 685224
