Mobile crane saves money on this building site

What to do with tons of soil and rock excavated from the basement of this new home?

For this job we had to excavate a site for a basement with footings and a lift shaft. The challenge was that the site was quite narrow so the excavation material couldn’t be stored onsite. The usual solution would be to load it straight into a tipper truck and take it to a landfill. Then, once the base was finished, it would have to be returned to the site for the backfill. All in all a costly exercise!

So we came up with another plan. Our aim was to remove some of the soil and rocks, build a section of the basement and walls, and then return the material as immediate backfill. This meant we would only have to store a small amount of excavation material at a time and wouldn’t have to cart it away to a landfill.

Small telehandler with lots of power!

We needed to use a mobile crane telehandler that was small enough to work in the narrow space, but strong enough to carry out the huge rocks that were excavated. So we decided on the Manitou MT 1033 HTL. While this machine is relatively small, it has a lifting capacity of 3,3 tons and a reach of 10 m, so it was just what we needed.

In addition to the Manitou we had to use a front-end loader to loosen the boulders and dig out the sand. The front-end loader dumped the excavation material straight into the telehandler’s bucket, which then carried the material away.

This arrangement worked perfectly! Another advantage was that we could carry some of the huge, excavated boulders to a nearby open space and begin chipping them down for use as building material. In fact, all the rock material for construction and cladding came from the building site itself, saving a lot on the costs. You can see one of the rocks in the photo below.

The versatile telehandler also came in handy with carrying bricks, laying steel reinforcement and even mixing and laying the concrete.

By the time the basement was finished the machine had paid for itself. Just imagine how much labour and expense was saved by the end of the project!

If you’ve got a job for our Manitou and Magni telehandlers, give us a call and let’s get the work done!

Liftup Teleporter – telehandler and mobile crane hire in Cape Town and surrounds.