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!

 

[Sep]

I would say 3 gallons of gas or diesel per hour @ $3.50 per gallon which is $10.50.
Oil change every 200 hours would be less then $300 if you paid a muncipal worker to do it. So that would be 1.50 cents per hour
Knife change, anvil replacement, and knife flipping is safely under $5 per hour
Tire replacement, greasing, air filters etc are all less then $3 per hour.

I would say you could safely run and maintain that chipper very well at costing it at $25 per hour, without figuring in the purchase price of the machine.

 

[Kaveman]

A fair price is as much as you can get. It's your chipper, it cost you money. You bought it for you to use, presumably.

It's all fine and dandy to break down the costs and such and figure the math buuuUuuut: they want to hire the machine, not you or your crew? So they're being cheap from the start. Are they going to cover the cost of a catastrophic failure should it happen? Are you looking to get into the equipment rental game? Personally, I'd want to just bid the job as brush/debris removal. Then I know the equipment is being used properly and that there's much less chance of accidental trip and fall into the chipper.

Maybe I'm just being a "bellend" as they say across the pond, but there's companies who rent equipment at reasonable rates, all over the place.

 

[Mick!]

About €250 a day here, no half days or hourly rentals.

 

[Nutball]

Never know when there may be a chunk of metal hidden in a log. Gotta plan for major breakdowns.

 

[flushcut]

Nah, run it like ya stole it. Lol

 

[Altissimus]

I told him that my guess from owning is for every fourty hours of running , figure on four more in maintenance

 

[Dave Shepard]

Maintenance costs go way down when you stop replacing those three marker lights under the feed tray. Their expected lifespan is measured in days. Less if they actually start the chipper.