Which Would Be Better to Dig the Hole of an Underground House, a Backhoe or an Excavator?
I’m interested in purchasing either one because I think it’d be cheaper than just hiring someone, but I don’t know which would be more efficient to get the job done. Can anyone explain how you use them?
I know several people that can do the job, i really want to know which is better for the job, the one with the flat bucket thing or the one with the scoop. This is a piece of equipement that will be used for many many other things on a large piece of property out in the middle of nowhere. I’ve done my research on the prices of them, I’m not worried about the price of the machinery. Thanks.
[affmage source="ebay" results="20"]bulldozer[/affmage]
Well, technically a backhoe is a type of excavator. The difference is that it’s usually an attachment that goes on the back of some kind of tractor or other excavating equipment (like a front-loader). An excavator has a wider bucket that’s permanently mounted on the machine. That is, that’s all it’s for. But, a backhoe is one of many attachments that you could put on a machine to do various jobs (like a scoop or an auger).
And, I seriously doubt that it would be cost effective to buy excavating equipment rather than paying someone to do it for you. It also takes quite a bit of skill to operate heavy equipment like that. It would be considerably cheaper and you’ll get a much better job done just paying someone to do it for you.
the price of either one is staggering.cheaper to hire some one or rent one.an excavator will be better.but with either one you need to know what your doing their not that easy to operate.the back hoe is good for small jobs and tight place,s
Unless you have a line on a really fantastic deal, I can’t imagine that buying the equipment would make sense for one job.
If you’ve never used one, you need to consider carefully what you are doing…
You can go to places like Ready Rents, Hertz (equipment, not just cars) and such and they can rent you such things. In my area, they seem to go for around $150-200/day. If all you are looking is digging a big hole in the ground and it doesn’t need to be exact, you can probably manage it on your own… but if you are talking about a hole big enough for a house, you really need to know what you are doing because now it’s big enough to be a cave-in hazard, you better make real sure to have Blue Stake or someone come out to mark everything because if you hit a utility line, not only is it dangerous, you get to pay for the repair and cost of loss of service.
When we built our current home, we were planning on leveling the land (carving it out of the hillside) for nearly an acre size portion ourselves since we had the opportunity to borrow the equipment for free.
One of my brother-in-law’s customers does Laser-planing for the farmers in the area and so we asked him what he would charge for such a big job… it cost us $700… $70/hour and it took him a little over one day. When he was done, that whole big area was as flat as a pool table. If we had done it ourselves, we’d have spent days and days, and weeks and… well, you get the picture.
Don’t be fooled by how easy it looks when you watch people who have a lot of experience… I can tell you from personal attempts… it’s pretty easy to dig a hole… as long as you don’t have any particular shape in mind! It’s a whole different story if you want any kind of precision.
If I had to make a guess, unless you are talking about a huge house, an experienced backhoe/trackhoe operator will have that hole dug in about one day… you will spend at least a week trying to do the same thing and it won’t be done half as well.
Of course, doing itself has one advantage over hiring it done…
You finally get to play with the big boy version of those Tonka Toys we all loved as little boys! (I have to admit I enjoyed it! hehehe)