Neil from Messick's here to talk to you about some of the right and wrong applications for a hydraulically-powered snow blower. Very regularly, we get people coming in wanting to put a snow blower on their front loader. After all, you've got a very capable tractor, 60 horsepower back here in the engine that can do all kinds of impressive, meaningful work. It would seem very natural that coming out and popping a snow blower on the front of your loader should be a natural fit, right? But it's a bad idea in a number of different places. I'll walk you around here to talk a little bit today about hydraulic horsepower.
There's a handful of implements that if they're not powered properly, really just don't work that well. You take a big snow blower like this and if you don't have that auger spinning fast enough and you try to power this thing through the snow, it just kind of pukes it off to the side. It really doesn't clear it out of the way like you want a snow blower to. We find that a lot with hydraulically-powered snow blowers like this. They just don't perform all that well, even when made it up the skid steers, which is really what they're intended for. You'll see this is a high-flow unit right here that they're recommending to have 42 GPM in order to power this thing adequately.
That's going to put somewhere in the neighborhood of about 60 horsepower into this unit. When we look at my MX Series tractor back here, this tractor has 9.5 gallons of hydraulic flow, now, if that seems low to you, remember that some of the less honest companies out there in the market will combine their power steering flow and implement hydraulic flows together in order to come up with a bigger number. 9.5 gallons a minute is the honest number of what's actually going to come out of third function out here on the front.
If we take that hydraulic flow, that 9.5 gallons, multiply it by the PSI, the pressure coming out of those lines of 2,800 pounds, and divide by 1,714, which is a constant, that's going to tell us the amount of horsepower, hydraulic horsepower that we have coming out of those front remotes. In the case of this tractor, if you were to actually go through and hook this whole setup like this, you'd be disappointed to find that you're only putting a little bit over 15 horsepower out into this gigantic snow blower. A machine like this very clearly should be capable of more than that.
You need to get more than 15 horsepower off of this big old tractor down to your implements to do some work. You're going to find that the PTO is going to be the place to do that at. When you have spinning shafts directly connected to your engine, you're much more efficiently moving that power off of the engine, off the power plant of your machine, and out to your implements. While you're 60 horsepower at the engine of a tractor like this, you're around 51 and change coming off the shaft here at the back at the PTO. If you're looking for a snow blower set up on a tractor like this, the right way to do that would be to actually run the PTO.
There are several companies out there that are going to make front-mounted snow blowers for tractors like this that are going to feed power off the back, drop it down and then send it out to the front of the machine. By using a setup like that, you could run that same horsepower, that same snow blower out front, but with nearly three times the horsepower.
Now, you notice here I started with the rear PTO on this tractor. As you go through the spec sheets of some machines, you're going to find that more deluxe tractors are going to have mid PTOs. Those machines are going to have an extra gear set in the transmission back here that gives you a PTO option pointing forward. That is specifically made for this exact application, for when you're going to have front attachments, normally a snow blower or a broom that needs to run off of those spinning shafts feeding from the back. This is one of those things that's going to differentiate a deluxe tractor from a standard economy tractor.
Those gear sets add expense, and so your more expensive, more deluxe models are often going to come through with those as standard equipment or have them as options where the economy machines like this MX did not. That does not necessarily preclude you from being able to do these kinds of things. Companies like Erskine are going to have snow blowers that feed off that rear PTO and turn the corner and come back to the front to give a one-size-fits-many option for a front snow blower on a utility tractor.
Surely, you say, there's got to be a way to do this. After all, we do run some hydraulic motors and hydraulic attachments out on the front of a tractor using a hydraulic power pack. A situation where you're going to add something onto the three-point hitch that's going to have a tank and a reservoir on the back there with a pump in order to be able to have an isolated hydraulic system that can create more flow than what the tractor really intends to itself.
You can actually come up with some workable solutions there. If we look at the way that we tend to run these titan TrailBlazer mowers, usually we like to run these with a 12 or 14-gallon-per-minute tank on the back of the tractor. Fundamentally, though, you want to keep the physics and the mechanics of all this in mind. Anytime that you have a hydraulic pump and a hydraulic motor, you're going to have a certain amount of inefficiency through these systems. If you're just as much losing a 10% at each pump and motor just by having one of each, you've got now 80% of your horsepower out of the other end where shafts are going to transmit that power a lot more efficiently and get more power down to your implement where you actually want it.
Yes, in theory, you could go out with taking that MX Series tractor with a 25-gallon-per-minute pump on the back of it and actually run a pretty meaningful snow blower out on the loader and probably be halfway happy with it. It's going to be costly because you're going to need some big pumps and big reservoirs to make it work. You do actually see some companies sell things this way, but the performance of them is never going to be as good as the ones that are shaft driven off of your tractor.
As cool as this setup looks, as much fun as it would be to operate in theory, let's keep all these mechanical fundamentals in mind that just really lead us to believe that this is not a great way to set this thing up. We're going to have a lot better options for you in a front-mount snow blower driven from the back or the middle of your tractor We're working on some videos for you, too, of the newer style of snow blower now where you put it on the rear of your tractor and drive forward over top of the snow while that picks the snow up in the back and discharges it so you can put it on the back of your tractor without craning your neck around all the time.
Keep an eye on the channel here. Hit that Subscribe button. We've got a lot of cool videos coming up for you featuring snow equipment here over the next couple of months. Happy to help you with any parts, sales or service needs that you might have for your equipment. You can give us a call at 800-222-3373, or check us out at messicks.com.
