What Are Power Take Offs?

What are power take offs, anyway? This short page will explain what the term means, how field service businesses (maybe even yours) use them, and why connecting them to the right GPS tracking service can lead to huge benefits for your company.

You might have heard of power take offs described only as PTOs, or maybe you’ve never encountered either term. But if you’re part of a construction or site service business, chances are you know what power take offs are, even if you’ve never heard them described this way.

A power take off (sometimes written as power take-off) is a tool used for borrowing power from one source and transmitting it to a piece of equipment that can’t power itself.

A PTO device (usually a mechanical gearbox) that connects a truck’s engine to external attachments such as air compressors, tree spades, or hydraulic lifts—using the vehicle’s power to operate those pieces of equipment.

So, if your service techs power their tools (pumps, blowers, compactors, etc.) at job sites by connecting those tools to your vehicle, then your company uses power take offs.

And here’s why integrating your power take-offs with the right GPS tracking service can generate a huge advantage for your company.

The Big Benefit of Integrating Power Take Offs with GPS Tracking

In addition to knowing where your company’s vehicles are at all times, one of the many benefits of GPS tracking is that it give your team key real-time (and historical) data about what’s going on with your equipment in the field.

By connecting your GPS tracking software to your fleet’s power take offs, you can track not only your trucks’ health and performance levels but also important details about the tools and equipment your techs use in the field. You can learn, for example:

• The average number hours your techs operate your pneumatic blowers during a specific type of job, which can give you a better sense of how many actual hours that job should take.
• How many total operational hours each of your PTO-powered compactors, pumps, or generators are racking up in the field, which can alert you to proactively service or replace this equipment, so you won’t have costly malfunctions or downtime.
• You can also automatically receive digital records of specific equipment-in-use time at each job site, which can help both with billing and auditing purposes.

All of this data can help you and your team make better-informed decisions when it comes to bidding on jobs, estimating employee hours, and getting the greatest return on investment from all of your field equipment.

Make sure to check out some of our highly rated reviews from satisfied customers using PTOs on Capterra or TrustPilot!