Hydraulic Winches

We have had a number of Warn electric winches on our 4WD's and found them to be very good, but when we bought the F250 we decided to try a TJM 10,000 lb OX winch.
In testing it appeared to operate well but much slower than the electrics that we had been used to, but on 2 ocassions while in WA I tried to winch vehicles off the beach that had become stuck with rising tides. The hydraulic winch just didn't seem to have the power that the smaller electric ones had and I couldn't pull the vehicles out of their bog. While hooked onto the 2nd one earlier this year I realised that even though I had it through a snatch block that the winch wasn't strong enough to pull my F250 towards the badly bogged Patrol, so it couldn't have been putting out much power.

On our return home we went back to TJM who gave us a reasonable trade in price for the hydraulic winch and we now have an OX 15,000 lb electric winch fitted. The OX appears to be slightly slower than the WARN winches that we have had previously but is much faster than the hydraulic winch was.

After TJM changed them over, they informed me that the poor performance was probably caused through a pressure relief valve in the power steering pump operating, preventing the winch getting up to full torque.
So if anyone is considering fitting a hydraulic winch go into all the pros and cons first and see if you can have the maximum strength of it tested before you really need it to work in a recovery situation.