The first thing that you need to understand about electric winches is their categories and types. Like the recovery, utility and ATV winches are used for pulling out vehicles from rough terrains. While the car trailer, boat and utility winches help in unloading and loading heavy articles like boats or vehicles off and on the trailers. All kind of cranes including small marine cranes and the big ones use electric winches for lifting up and holding articles off the ground. 

 

Now let’s discuss these categories into a little detail. If you are to choose the best vehicle recovery or ATV winch capacity then you must know the Gross Vehicle Weight as well as the rated capacity of the winch. You would also want to take care of other important factors that can influence your selection of winch capacity. These factors include the quantity of friction over the object that is being pulled, inclination of ground, if the pulley block is being used or not, and number of rope layers that are around the winch drum. 

 

Similarly, if you are working for trailer winch capacity you would need to take care of all above mentioned factors and rolling weight. There are a few other winch size considerations that you would need to give. On the basis of  of rolling load weight and trailer ramps slope, you can easily calculate the minimum winch that will be needed for the job. But you must remember that winches rating depends on first rope layer over the drum as it works and would be pulled at lesser point that its maximum. 

 

Usually winches lose 13-25% of pulling strength with every wrap rope makes on winch drum. We recommend you to use a winch whose line pull capacity equals the load that is being moved. The pulling strength of winch can be enhanced by inserting a pulley block in it.