MIKE FRADE - Don't give these guys with 7 & 8 HP Cubbies too much confidence in how a mounted snow blower will perform. Everybody's situation is different. In nice dry fluffy powdery snow which we seldom see you can move 6-8 inches of snow but in wet heavy snow, the kind that makes GREAT snowballs and snow men & women, don't expect to take a full swath in much over four inches. I always found the point of best performance was just before you over-loaded the engine and lost RPM, so running 70-90% of maximum capacity was best. Once you drop off maximum full load RPM throwing distance drops off quickly. And blowing snow a second time takes a lot more HP than moving it the first time.
Most walk behind blowers use 8 HP engines in only a 26 inch wide machine. We're expecting a 7-8 HP engine to move a 700+# tractor and run the blower.
One of the last years I mounted my blower when we still lived in the Quad-Cities we got a 10-12 inch snow. I cleaned my drive, neighbor used his walk-behind, and his neighbor used his off-topic wrong color 14 HP tractor/blower. I normally cleaned all their drives during the week so their wives could get into their garages since I was working nights. About 7 PM the door bell rings. It was our paper boy. He'd committed to cleaning too many driveways that day and said "Can I borrow your tractor?". Well, that wasn't happening. I put all my winter clothes back on, we walked down the street a block, big 100 ft long, 20 ft wide crushed rock driveway with a steep slope up to the garage with 10-12 inches of snow. I go back and gas the Cubbie, it had the 10 HP in it by then, drove down the street and tried to drive up the slope without moving snow. Couldn't make it, had to blow a path clear. Taking full 36" swath slipping the clutch the whole way took me ten minutes to get to the top digging holes in the loose crushed rock the whole way. Once I could get up the drive I'd blow going downhill wide open in 1st gear taking almost a full swath. The bottom of the drive where the city plow trucks had piled snow from 16 foot of pavement slowed me down still. Took me about 35-40 minutes to clean the whole drive.
Where I live now in the country, we get a LOT of drifting, there's an 80 acre corn field across the road that the wind normally deposits most of it's snow in the road and my yard. The DOT has learned to put up snow fence to reduce the drifting, in fact, they put up more snow fence this year than in ANY of the 20 yrs we've lived here this year. I'll have places in my driveway that there's no snow, then right in front of the garage doors it'll drift 2-3 feet deep with only a 6-8 inch snow fall. Storm of the Century 2 yrs ago I had drifts 3 ft deep packed in hard enough I could walk on top of them. They pushed out in HUGE chunks 8-10 feet wide and just as long ahead of my snow blade. That's why I use the larger tractors for most of my snow removal now.
