I've been lurking around ETS for a while, and finally got around to registering, great website and forum here

anyway, I've had an idea that I've been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, I was reminded even more during the New England Ice Storm of 2008, back around Dec 15, 2008, we were slammed by a massive ice storm, 30,000 homes without power in Coastal Maine alone, New Hampshire was even harder hit

anyway, it took six days to get the power back on, we didn't see a single Central Maine Power (worst power company in the universe, IMHO) line truck until late evening on day 5 and 6

thankfully, we had plenty of wood for heat (the house has three fireplaces and a woodstove in the sunroom), water set aside, plenty of cold weather clothing, heavy blankets on the beds, oil lamps and battery powered flashlights, the only real inconvenience was the lack of gray water for washing up and flushing

I had some containers in the sunroom growing lettuce and tomatoes, so in the depths of January, we had fresh veggies available for snacks as well

anyway, on to my point....

We have an old Kubota G5200HST diesel garden tractor (3-cyl diesel) that we use to plow the driveway in winter and mow the lawn in the summer, it sees a lot of heavy use year round, it's easily 20+ years old and runs just as good as the day it rolled off the assembly line

I was thinking, if there was a way to rig up a generator to the PTO (the front will have the snowblower in the winter, the rear PTO will have the mower in the summer) we could have a highly-mobile electric generator for those numerous times when CMP drops the ball and sends us another power outage

how would I build a PTO powered generator that runs off the tractor's engine, I'm assuming the easiest way would be to find someone selling a small generator with a dead petroleum motor, remove the generator components and hook them up to the tractor

I figure, we have half of the neccesary generator components already, building up the other half shouldn't be *too* hard...