Cost for hourly Chipper needed. Thanks ,

[Altissimus]

Buddy is managing for a small municipality and needs a hourly cost figure for running the Chipper they own. Fuel and Maintenance I guess , it's a Woodchuck 17 , frame W/C17 motor 236D. Off the top of my head is a $50 guess close ?

 

[Patrick A]

Maybe include some cost for the chip truck. If I can avoid taking the chip truck and chip in a pile onsite, my daily cost goes way down.

 

[flushcut]

I think 50$ is on the high side but in the ballpark.
I see a lot of municipalities start a chipper at the beginning of a shift and keep it running full bore until shift end. That is probably not the most fuel efficient but probably saves wear and tear starting and stopping, plus it will rack up the hour meter while not chipping material costing more in maintenance based on hours alone.

I like staging material and chipping it all at once so my chipper runs maybe half an hour per removal. But that’s just me.

 

[Patrick A]

Not just you. We make neat piles and run the chipper only when we run out of room. In the rare occasions we feed the chipper with a mini excavator, then the job goes fast enough to have minimal people and machine idling.

 

[SeanKroll]

Yep.



and minimal chipping with ropes out, when close working.

 

[Mick!]

Depends.

If you can get the chipper close to the tree, and the climber and groundy(ies) can work in sync I run it all the time, only revving down for refills of saws or if there’s some tricky rigging or other reason to lower the intensity.

Sure, if there’s a long drag, then you can stack it for intermittent blasts of the chipper.
But I’ve seen pics of removals where the tightarsed boss insists on stacking then chipping just to save diesel or putting hours on the chipper, and it makes my blood run cold in fury!