I’ll give a recent backhoe experience: In the last several weeks, I recently dug a 210’ electrical trench to my new barn. All with the backhoe. Not the perfect tool for the job, but I didn’t have to worry about 40 mins of round trip commute to the rental places. Also, Home Depot is always out of rental machines and the mom and pop shop is only open from 8-2 Saturday, closed Sundays. So you have to rent for the whole weekend and then I’d have to worry about returning it Monday morning, and not getting my work clothes dirty in the process. A tracked mini ex would have been nice, but the anxiety of returning it would have been bad for the marriage. And $410+tax to rent for the weekend.
A trencher never would have worked. It actually would have cost me even more because I would’ve been been back for the MiniEx We pulled out several 400+ lb boulders along the way with the BH thumb. Then last weekend my wife decided she wanted to put some of those boulders in the front yard for decoration, or whatever (they do look nice). A couple of them were on sketchy slopes. But no problem for the BH and thumb to move them. Could I have moved them without a BH? Sure, probably, with either some more man power or dragging them with chains. But that would have taken much more time and greater risk of injury. Instead, it took maybe 90 seconds. And marital bliss was achieved.
I would guess I have a similar experience to the above every 4-6 weeks (on average) where I’m very glad that I have the BH. I might buy a bigger tractor at some point, but I will always have a BH either on my BX if I keep it or on a bigger machine.
Out of my $300 monthly finance payment, I estimate maybe 5-10% is paying for the backhoe. So owning a backhoe costs me $15-$30/month. In my opinion it easily pays for itself.
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