You Can Always Count On A Hydrovac

For over 30 years North America has seen this rise (and boom) of the hydrovac market. Utilities and construction projects have capitalized on the speed and precision of this equipment with an overall benefit of safety and damage prevention which has seen the industry save millions of dollars over the years. There’s no doubt that hydrovac excavation  has been established as an extremely safe and productive way to excavate in proximity to underground infrastructure.

Yet the most prominent hydrovac manufacturers and vendors are continuously editing out the “hydro” moniker an changing the name of the equipment to “vacuum excavators”.

Not Sure If It Means What You Think It Means

Major players like Vermeer have shifted from labelling their top line of hydrovacs that are “equipped to do more” to the “NEW line of vacuum excavation trucks” which are exactly the same, only their long-standing identifier has changed. Even Vactor who is well known in the wastewater sector has dropped the “hydro” for its Truvac lineup and is now “dedicated to vacuum excavation”.

Hydro of course, is the key element for these great machines to convert ground matter into a liquid that is effectively sucked up with a powerful positive displacement blower system. This equipment is at its highest efficiency when properly applying the right quantities of water to your excavation – especially here in Ontario during the winters when hot water can be utilized.

So Where Did The Water Go?

Rest assured that these, along with the vast selection of trucks in our fleet, are all the same hydrovacs we’ve come to know and love and work hard with, but there is a rising pressure now in North America to stop using so much water. With regions in Canada and the US now mandating that safe-digging excavations be done without the use of water, there has essentially been a stigma created around the term “hydrovac” which is rather unfortunate considering these trucks become a lot less performant without that key element, and a lot of costly problems arise from trying to use a hydrovac to dig dry.

Naturally, in order to remove the negative optics around hydrovacs being sold, or working in regions where dry digging is mandated, these and other companies have made the only adjustment they could really make concerning the equipment they produce or provide – the hydrovac you’ve been using for years is now a vacuum excavator, congratulations.

 

We Found A Better Solution

At Super Sucker, hydrovacs are our bread and butter, we are the leading provider of advanced hydrovac and support services in Ontario and we make sure that the equipment we bring to your project is top of the line.

However, as experts in this industry we’ve also discovered limitations, restrictions, and general pain points in hydrovac excavation, which is why we work with manufacturers to improve upon the equipment, as well as the service we can deliver. We have known for quite sometime that a need to dig dry was coming and knew that a hydrovac would never be able to meet the expectations they’re known for if they were forced to dig dry.

Hydrovacs are awesome machines that deliver the highest safety standards and productivity levels when needing to excavate around sensitive infrastructure, in many cases we will showcase a hydrovac as the right tool for the job – but never when dry digging is required. Now we could have done what everyone else is doing and simply hid the fact that we need water to be efficient, but back when we saw there was going to be a need, we investigated potential solutions and are quite confident that we found it.

suction excavator

Digging Dry Is Not A Problem For Us

There are a lot of dry vac options out there in the marketplace but the majority of them can never perform at the levels that hydrovacs are known for, many have been tried and tested but only one has truly succeeded.

The dry vac trucks we have introduced into our fleet are known in Europe as Suction Excavators, they’ve been used overseas for decades as the safe digging equipment of choice. These machines operate with twin fan systems to generate air conveyance that is much more powerful than the suction created by a hydrovac and in a lot of different applications they will outperform a hydrovac by 3 to 4 times the throughput.

Instead of trying to hide the fact that we couldn’t dig dry, we expanded our fleet to include the best dry vacs in the world. We successfully adapted them to the North American industry and have been using them for years in pipeline and substation work, and in scenarios where it’s much more effective to dig dry and reuse excavated materials.

We have essentially become experts in “vacuum excavation”, also known as utilizing both hydro, and dry vac equipment in the right applications, which will continue to ensure the highest safety and productivity standards on your projects.

Everyone else is just going to tell you that a hydrovac can dig dry.

No matter what your construction requirements are, we have the right tools for your project, the right people to get the job done and we produce the results that ensure our clients are happy.

We proudly service the GTA, Burlington, Hamilton, Mississauga, Newmarket, London, Cambridge, and Tri-City areas. If you have any further questions, contact us at sales@supersucker.ca or call our Book-A-Truck hotline.