I am new to this forum and I realize that this is an old thread, but I thought that someone might benefit from my experience in having used a PTO generator.
I live in the country and when my power goes out and it is out longer than an hour or so, it will probably be days before it comes back on. Since moving to the country in 1994 I have experienced many power outages due to ice storms, hurricanes, and other severe weather. When I was without power for 12 days in one year due to an ice storm in the winter (7days) and a hurricane the following summer (5days) I decided that I needed to do something. After looking at several options I chose to get a PTO generator since I already had a Massey Ferguson 240 tractor (46 engine hp and 41 PTO hp). I purchased a new 25 KW PTO generator with a 60KW surge, and at the time I paid about $3,000 for it.
I have a car port located approximately 75 feet from my house, and I had an electrician professionally install an electrical panel box at the carport and tie this into my house circuit boxes in my garage through underground wires. I hook my PTO generator, which is mounted on its own trailer, to my tractor and pull it up to the house and park the tractor and generator under the car port. There I hook the electrical cables from the installed electrical panel into the generator and set my PTO speed to where the voltage meter on the generator says it is producing 240 V at 60 hertz. Then I flip a switch and I am providing power to my home. From the time I decide to hook it up, and until I have the power back on, takes me about 15 minutes. Most of that time is walking to the tractor shed where the tractor and generator are stored, hooking the generator trailer to the tractor draw bar, connecting the PTO shaft to the tractor, and driving it back up to the house. When I suspect that we may be without power - such as when the weather forecast is calling for severe weather - I will hook everything up in advance, and have everything set up under the carport and ready for immediate use. Then all I have to do is crank the tractor, rev up to the proper PTO rpms, and throw the switches. I always keep about 75 gallons of diesel fuel stored under the carport so that I will have it in case of an emergency.
I have been extremely happy with my PTO generator, and it does all that I want it to do. I have never had any problems while using it. I doubt that my tractor PTO (41 horsepower) is capable of producing the full 25 KW, but obviously I have never required that amount. When using the PTO generator I have both well and septic pumps that I use, my wife washes clothes and uses the clothes dryer, we have two heat pumps that we run for heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, we use electric baseboard heaters in the bathrooms, we use the stove and oven for cooking, we use all the kitchen appliances, and use the hot water heater and the refrigerator, and any lights that are needed. We don't shut off any circuit breakers in the panel boxes. We go about business as usual just as if we were still receiving power from the electric company. In the summertime we even continue to use the swimming pool pump and filtration system. The only precautions that I do take is that I will unplug all my computer equipment and the large flat screen TVs before I convert to the PTO generator, because I have read that electronic equipment can possibly be damaged while using PTO generated electricity. However I have a small less expensive flat screen TV and a laptop computer that I have used while on the PTO generator and never had any problems.
I have read many pros and cons about PTO generators in this thread and other threads on this forum, but I am very happy with mine and I have been using it for at least 15 years. It is rugged and has always been reliable and dependable. I have faith and confidence that if I needed it tomorrow it would do what I needed it to do. I am sure that there might be better solutions available and a PTO generator may not the perfect solution. Some of the down sides, as other have mentioned, are that they can be fairly expensive to run as diesel fuel is not cheap, but neither is the cost of getting a hotel rooms if you could find one. The tractor turning the generator does make more noise than the small 5-8 KW gas generators, but I sleep on the side of the house that faces the carport where I run the tractor to power the generator, and it does not keep me awake at night and none of my neighbors have complained about the tractor running all night. Most of my neighbors have the smaller gas powered generators and I would bet that they can not hear my tractor running over the noise that their smaller gas generators are making. Another con for me is that my wife is not physically capable of hooking it up, and I will always have to be here to do that. She is also not physically capable of refueling the tractor. I am not concerned about the number of hours that I am putting on the tractor engine. No more than I use my tractor for other things around here, I will not live long enough to wear it out. I have owned my tractor since 1997 and I have less than 800 hours on it. One big advantage for me having a PTO generator that will produce enough electricity for me to power my entire house is that my daughter and her family live nearby, and when I am without power, she is too. So I am always able to provide a safe and warm place for her, my son-in-law, and the grand kids to stay when needed.
While I agree that $3000.00 is a lot to pay for a PTO generator, a 25 KW stand alone generator would probably have been 3 to 4 times more costly, and while a smaller 5 -8 kw gas generator would have been 1/3 less expensive, it would not have done all that I wanted it to do. So for me, since I already had the tractor, it only made sense to go the PTO generator route. Had I not already owned a tractor, then it obviously would have made more sense to go in a different direction. In the future if I ever get to where I am not physically capable of hooking things up and refilling the tractor with fuel, I will probably end up selling the PTO generator as well as the tractor and use the money to buy a whole house generator that runs off propane and come on automatically when your power goes out. But as long as I am physically able to do the work, I am very happy with my PTO generator.
I hope this information helps someone who is considering whether to get a PTO generator.
Thanks for reading!
Curtis