Air Offers Cost Savings and Jobsite Versatility to Vacuum Excavating
These are some of the primary considerations on every construction and maintenance project when selecting an arsenal productive equipment.
And they are just a few of the reasons why more contractors and municipalities now rely on compressed air vacuum excavation to safely and effectively demolish and remove materials from below the earth’s surface.
In fact, compressed air excavation now offers a host of productivity advantages over excavators and backhoes with buckets, augers and other attachments, or even manual labor and shovels to handle delicate digging.
By digging continuously, without stopping to refill and dump wastewater like hydro excavators must do, these air-based machines can perform a wider range of delicate maintenance, repair, new construction and other work with greater safety and urgency than ever before.
Using highly compressed air to loosen and then extract a wide variety of materials including dirt, clay, aggregate, sand and gravel, it’s possible to make effective, urgent repairs around gas lines, electrical conduit, telecommunication cables and water mains.
DESIGNED-IN VERSATILITY
Growing communities also find air vacuum excavation offers a safe, capable means to accomplish focused daylighting to explore what’s below the ground before mass excavation begins, eliminating costly backfill, concrete and asphalt patching.
And as a development continues, they find versatile compressed air vacuum excavators can also create precise holes for potholes, signs and posts as well as trenches with narrow, controlled-depth cuts for utility installation and sprinkler systems.
Air excavation is especially useful when there’s no nearby source of water for refills, which makes hydro excavation impossible. Compared with hydro excavation, an air-based system eliminates non-productive shutdown periods and associated costs for water refills and required wet debris removal, testing and dumping.
Excavating using compressed air means extracted material can be dumped directly back onto the job site, or into a hole that must be refilled, so there’s even less interruption in the excavation process.
That’s a particular advantage for the Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) industry, which has a need to quickly dig test holes of precise diameters and depths and then refill them with small particles that are ideal for compaction.
ADVANTAGES WORKING AROUND ELECTRICAL CABLES
The ability to regulate the air pressurization and air vacuum power is also useful when exposing and recovering electrical lines and buried cables. Lines carrying electricity typically can be more brittle, while the non-conductive nature of air can be an important safety advantage over excavating with water.
In winter work, hydro excavators have won wide favor for their ability to break through frozen ground by jetting streams of heated water. On the other hand, air vacuum and jetting equipment does not require any winterization.
To even further the versatility advantage of the air vacuum approach to excavation, single models are available that can individually dig with both air and water, depending on the need. However, with combination machines, operators must make sure the filtration system does not get clogged with wet material.
