On a hydro excavator, the money is made when the water and vacuum are running, not when the truck is parked on site. We wire a hydrovac's equipment into its GPS tracker so you can see exactly how long the system ran at each job, across Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
A GPS tracker already shows when the truck arrived and left. What it can't tell you is how much of that time was spent digging. A hydro excavator can sit on site for hours waiting on locates, permits or the crew before the vacuum ever comes on. Monitoring the excavation system records the time the water and vacuum actually ran, at that address, as its own line in the platform.
When a job is billed by time, or a customer asks why it took so long, that record answers the question with times and a map rather than memory.
The vacuum blower and high pressure water pump need a lot of power. On many hydro excavators that power comes from the truck's own engine through a power take-off, or PTO. Others carry a separate engine on the body just to run the excavation system. PTO monitoring wires the PTO engaged signal into the tracker. On trucks with their own deck engine, we monitor that engine's run signal instead. Either way, the platform records when the excavation system was working.
There are a few ways to give the tracking device a reliable on and off signal, and the right one depends on the truck:
On a hydro excavator we may wire two inputs, one for the vacuum and one for the water pump, so the platform shows which was running. We meter every signal first, and truck-side wire colors are in our Vehicle Wiring Database.
We run the system on site: vacuum on, water on, each switched off in turn, and check that the platform shows each event at the right time. On trucks with a deck engine, we make sure the signal shows the engine running, not just the key turned. See PTO and equipment integration for the other trucks we wire this way.
Common questions
Yes, once the PTO or the deck engine's run signal is wired into the tracker. The platform then shows excavation time at each job.
Then we monitor that engine's run signal instead of a PTO. The result in the platform is the same.
Where each has its own signal and the tracker has two free inputs, yes.
Yes. We install across Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, at your yard or shop.
We install across Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, at your yard, on your schedule. Call or text 803-513-1009.
Constant. Ignition. Ground.
API Signal