fall cleanups with vacuums..what do you have?

[XLS]

It is amazing how many come on here asking for help but know it all and wont listen

we use painted 1/2"plywood and its good for about 5 years (long hauler here too) for $120.00 or less i dont care the investment at this point
I like all the big looking small guy who knew it all we can usually buy everything they have within 3 years on E-bay.

[adforester]

i dont read well wtf?

[rywnygc]

Originally Posted by XLS

I like all the big looking small guy who knew it all we can usually buy everything they have within 3 years on E-bay.

Thats why I'm debt free.

[Snyder's Lawn Inc]

Originally Posted by adforester

well i'm not in this for short term i'm in this for the long haul, that's why i want to get good equipment.

i don't know why but using an open trailer to haul leaves just seems trailer trashy to me lol. but we all do what we have to.

--my business will and has grown, no if and or buts about it thats why i just want to start out with an easier (be it "lazy" way). Trust me being over a vacuum all day
is much better for the back than dragging heavy tarps out of a trailer.

Yes dragging tarps does suck use to do it that way
My billy goat and mulching leaves in a row cuts the time in half and the lawn is cleaner
Making same amount per job but only taking me half the time
Yes I have more invested
But I always say to make money you have to spend it

[XLS]

Originally Posted by adforester

anyone do solo fall cleanups?
i was thinking with a leaf vacuum it would make it easier to do them without help. But dragging tarps I would need help and I figured it would cost $100 day for help 3 days a week for 1 1/2 months cleanup that's $1800 OR the price of a 16 hp leaf vacuum, see where i'm going with this?

If by easier you mean you mowed/mulched for 2 hours then remowed with a bagger for 1.5 hours to turn around and spend 1 hour more sucking them up and choking on dust to go home and have to remove 450+ lbs off the truck to dump it (long day) I would raather make it where i could mow them up and dump them directly into the trailer OR tarp .it saves alot of additional steps and time over the day plus the extral purchase cost , fuel and maintenance of the vac. Are you a sisy ??? a 10'x10' of tripple muclched leaves pulled up and tied cros way to form a bag is about 80 lbs tops NO one here is dragging a 20x18' tarp of leaves sorry ........................ buy 20 $5.00 tarps and just lay them out and mow and bag.

I dont care where you are in the U.S. you can find a TARP PULLER for way less then $100 a day . we get them at $50.00-$60.00 all americans just so it dont get brought up

[XLS]

here is a simple tip every time you cross a lawn full of leaves its time your not picking them up . everytime you dump leaves out on the ground is time lost
you need to work on your efficancies . We use walkers so we get blades cutting them then we get the blower shreeding them some ......... every time they back the mower on the trailer it saves Xamount of time off the vac.
we have crews doing tarps faster then the guys who simply dump on the trailer and then fill the top half of the trailers with the vacs becasue the 2 mean 1 is on a walker and they have 5 tarps on the mower . they mow a spot and get a dump they step off and lay tht tarp down dump on the spot and mow on the get a 2nd dump and then the 2nd guy ties it up and drags it to the trailer side then the process is repeated no walker crossing the lawn when the mower guy gets done the 2nd guy has the trees and beds cleaned out and they are done . they load the walker on the back and then they togather toss the tarps right on the trailer . in 5 minutes they have loaded ALL the leaves on a job ( no blower on the F-ing plannet will load leaves that fast.) you will burry the mower if it stacks that way then just tie it down and roll .

In the past i have had crews using dump boxes 8'wide x8'tall x16 ' long being loaded by 2 12"-or 14" hosed vacs ......... and they can throw them on faster . we no longer do that kind truck setup because its not as effecient as you think on a large scale

We currently only have 1 large leaf loading rig and it is larger then absolutely anything i have ever seen anywhere But what its loading up behind is about 5 times larger then anything on the market and i have only seen people using round roll hay balers that was where we are with leaves.

[adforester]

bagging leaves doesn't work up here in MA. I mean most of the guys i see bring the mowers with them to the job site as do I but you can only bag with the mower the thinnest and sparcest of leaf amounts, once theres more than a few leaves on the ground going under the mower it doesn't pick em up or clogs the 8" chute quickly. is that what your talking about?

[Kelly's Landscaping]

You regretting asking for advice yet I'm next door and can tell you the whole bag while mowing thing up here is a complete joke. As far as being quicker ehehehehe please the volume of leaves up here makes that impossible. There is a reason we run 18 hp self propelled fradan blowers or why we use jrco leaf plows on the lazers. You can move more leaves in a single plow shot then you can vac in 10-15 walker loads and that's a fact (got enough people up here that use them to know their capability's). The reason we vac is to condense the leaves so it fits in a truck and were not talking small piles sometimes before we vac we have 200-400 yards of leaves to pick up. Now you can do your leaf clean ups how ever you like but there's a big difference from a 2-3 man hour southern clean up to some homes up here that take the entire day with a 5 or 6 man crew.

Around the 3rd week of Oct here we start charging for bagging leaves with our lawn cuts by the end of the 4th week our typical 20-30 lawns a day per crew drops to less then 5 and we have to admit defeat. It becomes cost prohibitive to vac the leaves with the mowers at that point we have a about 7-14 days to get ready for full time clean ups and out come the blowers. And the reason for that is the mowers aren't worth using when you can not even get a single pass done before your 44 gal barrel is full.

[cuttin-to-the-Max]

Originally Posted by adforester

so your all saying tarp the leaves, but im not sure your hearing me say that i only have a f350 srw dump insert with a box on it. I also do have a 7x12' trailer that I could put sides on.

Ok im gonna make it real easy... Since you're in it for the long hall go get a BG 16-23HP loader.as usual bigger the better. TRY TO FIND ONE USED!!!! Leaf loaders are hard to beat the hell out of...because they are such a seasonal item. And build a box on your truck that is removable.... sides on your trailer is gonna be hard with a loader because its gonna make it hard to fit your mower in there.

Only reason why we put the loader on the trailer was because it was bigger (Fits 10+ resi's) We try to squeeze as many as we can get in there. Also because we do clean ups until we start plowing. Last year we did a clean up at 5PM and were plowing the next morning at 6AM 5-7" of snow. In our case its too hard to take the box off our dump truck in that short transition from cleanups to snow... And There is NO way we could plow with the box on so once we mover out of the glass factory shop with the over head lift we had to change things up!
I'll post a pic of squeezing 10+ cleanup in the box later

[cuttin-to-the-Max]

when you dont vent your box properly....you end up on top of it!