For folks who haven't operated an excavator, the trade-off with these mini-excavators isn't necessarily that they're underpowered. There are two other problems.
First, they are very wobbly and you're gonna be limited by that. You really need a fair amount of surface contact and a robust counterweight when you're extending the arm and moving boulders, pulling out roots, or digging into hard soil.
Second, you might look at specs and say "oh, cool, digging depth of 5 ft, I don't need more!". Except, this is attainable in one specific (and awkward) position of the excavator's boom and arm. It's less than that across most of the movement range.
Another thing to keep in mind that this is not like buying a car. An excavator or a tractor deprecates far more slowly, and many private owners keep them for 20-30 years. A diesel excavator will need DIY maintenance and simple repairs, but it should hold up for life. Battery-powered equipment will probably need new battery packs before that. Just something to keep in mind when figuring out the pros and cons. If you're in the suburbs, noise is a concern, but then, you honestly don't need your own excavator...
> An excavator or a tractor deprecates far more slowly, and many private owners keep them for 20-30 years.
There are still tractors and excavators from the 50's in regular use.
> Battery-powered equipment will probably need new battery packs before that.
It's a tiny 10kWh battery, $1000 - $2000. It looks like about 6 hours / cycle, so that's ~4000 of work time, longer if you don't mind reduced capacity. That's quite comparable to a diesel which needs an overhaul every ~10,000 hours.
The battery life is probably not an issue in practice; the author estimates 5 hours per charge - assuming a very conservative 2000-cycle life for the pack, that's 10,000 hours of work, which is quite respectable.
Yes, a private owner might keep a tractor for decades, but probably not using it for hours every single day and definitely not without some pretty significant repairs; the cost of a new 200ah battery pack is nothing compared to a diesel engine rebuild.
I... Tend to suspect other parts on these things will be unacceptably worn long before the battery craps out.
If you can dig 5ft you can trench ~5ft because you basically back the excavator as you go and are digging at full depth right in front of you all the time.
Related, Oslo has rules for reducing emissions from building sites which has made it a pioneer in the development and use of electric building machinery. Some of it is battery powered and some requires a really long extension cord. I do wonder how practical that is when maneuvering and if they need somebody to move the cable out of the way when it reverses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/10/oslo-leads-qui...
Thanks, whoever you are. We Americans, with pollution control laws and noise ordinances, didn't know other peoples are also concerned about these things.
I'm just a homeowner with a decent size piece of land and lots of trees. The ground is glacial till/drumlin, so rocks vary from gravel, to bowling balls and table size boulders.
I have a 7,000 lb excavator and couldn't imagine using smaller for my needs, but there is a right size for everyone!
I'd love it if mine were electric. I don't use it all of the time or all day, but the smoking old diesel is not the part of it that I enjoy.
I have owned a 3.5T mini excavator for over a decade. This class of machine is around 8’ wide and almost 10’ tall. Any bigger any I couldn’t haul it with my pickup truck. I use it regularly on my farm and love it, but it is far too big for many tasks.
Consequently, I recently bought a 1.3T micro excavator. It’s only 36” wide and less than 8’ tall, and even shorter with the canopy off. It opens up a whole new world of jobs that I can do without breaking my back, but it cannot come close to doing the same amount of work as the bigger machine.
Recently, I mucked out a livestock shelter with the micro machine, as my mini could barely reach into the structure without bumping the roof. The micro can drive all around in the structure; however, it can barely reach high enough to dump its bucket into the dump trailer. As a result, the small machine made a big pile outside the structure, then the big machine loaded it into the trailer.
Each machine did its portion of the work at least twice as fast as the other would take. It was a great demonstration of using the right tool for the job.
Would it be feasible to have micro-excavator drone? It seems like for one in article, a lot of space is used by the human driving it. They could make a smaller one that doesn't have cab and is controlled by remote. That would especially lower the height.
Isn't there also some display "room" where they show these huge mining machines from CAT?
They should have these at malls where wifes can drop their husbands off
Took my kids last year to Diggerland for my son's birthday, we had a great time, would highly recommend, see my other comment in this thread for a taste of what we saw/did.
It’s not even that—he worked with a factory to modify some of their excavators for US customers. So he knew exactly what he was getting because he helped design them.
My toddler is absolutely obsessed with excavators.
We've seen the famed "no-name diesel-powered Chinese mini-excavator bought at auction for $5,200" and I'd be lying if I say the thought hasn't crossed my mind ;)
An all electric excavator seems even cooler... now to leave the city.
Kind of reminds me of being on vacation with my family in Michigan and the only place with cell reception was a construction site nearby. While talking with my wife who was in Morocco at the time, I climbed inside a front loader to avoid the mosquitos and then discovered I couldn’t open the door from the inside to get back out. I don’t remember how I managed to finally escape my predicament.
There's even cheaper ones on AliExpress/Alibaba, and some of them are pretty good- there are YouTube videos from owners, and even some Reddit testimonials. The quality is extremely variable, but some of them are apparently pretty good.
60 years ago, a super shitty car company from Japan called Toyota starting importing their pieces of shit to us. They were small, weird, with a poorly translated manual. And they were shit. And Toyota kept improving, and learning from their mistakes, and got to know the US market better. And now they are one of the largest corporations on Earth.
This is why when I see a $1 stepper motor on AliExpress, or a YouTube review of some cheap Vevor tool, or a shipping container of electric miniexcavators, I realize this is China being a teenager, learning how to be an adult. And they are a lot bigger than Japan, and are going to have a bigger impact than Toyota, or Sony, or Mitsubishi.
And this is why I hate Trump. Because he is completely right about how much China is gaining on us, but he has no understanding of how or why, and is therefore doing absolutely nothing to actually help us maintain our manufacturing power.
Nail, on head.
And as a serial entrepenuer working with metal and machinery, I can promise you that western policy is very much built around protecting the bloated, monopolys and du-opoloys from inovation
and competition.
I built a thumb for my backhoe, from salvaged steel and ramdom used hydraulics, and it works great, I can grab and postion big rocks, and hold a tree at a convienient hight for bucking it up.
Total cash cost, under $400, to by from the dealer would be close to $10000, close to which side of 10000?, not sure.....
Full spanky new machine, ha!, grown men get moon eyed when they look at that old machine with its
bucket and thumb.
The real cost of wildly overpriced equipment is that it is a significant factor in rural devitalisation, with small land owners and farmers
unable to earn or create what is nessescary for raising a family. And we are then loosing the skills needed to do many of the things that are fundamental to maintaining and building basic infrastructure in smaller jobs at acceptable prices, leading to further decline.
The realy realy uggly part of this process, is that farm boys, having NO possibilty of staying in the country, signed up, and came back physicaly and/or damaged themselves, and now, for the most part, there is no remaing resevoir of humans, that
are inclined to do things in trenches, of whatever variety.
Its not called the military, industrial, complex, for nothing.
Both JP and SKR increased gdp/productivity ~10-20x when they had <2 TFR by increasing % of workforce to skilled/tertiary (advanced economies have skilled workforce approaching 70/80%). PRC is at ~20% while adding more skilled workforce than roughly OECD combined. Structurally China will add more just STEM in next 20 years than US projected to increase population, i.e. if every US newborn and immigrant (assuming current levels) are STEM, US will merely match PRC STEM generation. PRC also adding 80m other tertiary or vocational skilled ontop of that. For strategic competition, the structural demographic trend you should compare is PRC peaking at roughly 2x-3x US skilled workers who will be in workforce for 50+ years, i.e. greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. Meanwhile they'll be shedding 100s of millions of low productive workers. Imagine PRC workforce profile adding 5 japans and losing 3 nigerias. Another caveat being about 200m of population decline will be inefficient farming households that can be effectively replaced with 20m modern ag workers. Or 600m low productive (bottom 2 quantiles who are undereducated / old / left behind by modernization) contributes to like 5% of GDP, i.e. their consumption / productivity is comparable to a few 10s million of high value workers. Then consider PRC is also adding more industrial robotics / automation than RoW combined. The question is whether US can compete with PRC with multiple times more skilled talent and larger industrial base than they have now, both increasing at rates that US is structurally unable to close gap on for decades short of AGI / von neumann machine hailmary (which granted is a real possiblity, but then we're also in a world where PRC is spitting out incubated humans).
Common sense tells me that it seems unrealistic for America to compete in manufacturing with China when have significantly higher costs of living, many fewer people, and a much more educated workforce who is less willing to screw on doll heads for 16 hours a day.
Tariffs seem like a way to help American manufacturing compete given all of that
And yet the latest supra's are just badge engineered BMW's, and a lot of their cars are being recalled for engine problems, or because the wheels fall off...
Every month at the Bar None Auction there are quite a few newer model cheap excavators that go for about $3k. Typically like a 9k excavator or something small, gas or diesel powered.
Given the usage pattern of an excavator, which is that typically its sitting around until you need to use it nonstop for several days, I like the option of just filling it up with gas.
Readit News
First, they are very wobbly and you're gonna be limited by that. You really need a fair amount of surface contact and a robust counterweight when you're extending the arm and moving boulders, pulling out roots, or digging into hard soil.
Second, you might look at specs and say "oh, cool, digging depth of 5 ft, I don't need more!". Except, this is attainable in one specific (and awkward) position of the excavator's boom and arm. It's less than that across most of the movement range.
Another thing to keep in mind that this is not like buying a car. An excavator or a tractor deprecates far more slowly, and many private owners keep them for 20-30 years. A diesel excavator will need DIY maintenance and simple repairs, but it should hold up for life. Battery-powered equipment will probably need new battery packs before that. Just something to keep in mind when figuring out the pros and cons. If you're in the suburbs, noise is a concern, but then, you honestly don't need your own excavator...
There are still tractors and excavators from the 50's in regular use.
> Battery-powered equipment will probably need new battery packs before that.
It's a tiny 10kWh battery, $1000 - $2000. It looks like about 6 hours / cycle, so that's ~4000 of work time, longer if you don't mind reduced capacity. That's quite comparable to a diesel which needs an overhaul every ~10,000 hours.
Yes, a private owner might keep a tractor for decades, but probably not using it for hours every single day and definitely not without some pretty significant repairs; the cost of a new 200ah battery pack is nothing compared to a diesel engine rebuild.
I... Tend to suspect other parts on these things will be unacceptably worn long before the battery craps out.
Once you've dug away the floor enough, I imagine it's harder to get it out.
A 38-ton electric track excavator that requires a cable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuYgPv8s5c
In some countries things like pollution and noise matters. And China went all in on batteries.
I'm just a homeowner with a decent size piece of land and lots of trees. The ground is glacial till/drumlin, so rocks vary from gravel, to bowling balls and table size boulders.
I have a 7,000 lb excavator and couldn't imagine using smaller for my needs, but there is a right size for everyone!
I'd love it if mine were electric. I don't use it all of the time or all day, but the smoking old diesel is not the part of it that I enjoy.
Consequently, I recently bought a 1.3T micro excavator. It’s only 36” wide and less than 8’ tall, and even shorter with the canopy off. It opens up a whole new world of jobs that I can do without breaking my back, but it cannot come close to doing the same amount of work as the bigger machine.
Recently, I mucked out a livestock shelter with the micro machine, as my mini could barely reach into the structure without bumping the roof. The micro can drive all around in the structure; however, it can barely reach high enough to dump its bucket into the dump trailer. As a result, the small machine made a big pile outside the structure, then the big machine loaded it into the trailer.
Each machine did its portion of the work at least twice as fast as the other would take. It was a great demonstration of using the right tool for the job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggerland
Ever better is hiring a mini-digger from your local plant hire company when you’ve got some real work to do
https://tanktownusa.com/
Dead Comment
Without that, maybe the topic is about something like the customs and payment process.
I only clicked through as I expected something unusually-interesting, but read it anyway because electrified big-kid toys.
We've seen the famed "no-name diesel-powered Chinese mini-excavator bought at auction for $5,200" and I'd be lying if I say the thought hasn't crossed my mind ;)
An all electric excavator seems even cooler... now to leave the city.
This is why when I see a $1 stepper motor on AliExpress, or a YouTube review of some cheap Vevor tool, or a shipping container of electric miniexcavators, I realize this is China being a teenager, learning how to be an adult. And they are a lot bigger than Japan, and are going to have a bigger impact than Toyota, or Sony, or Mitsubishi.
And this is why I hate Trump. Because he is completely right about how much China is gaining on us, but he has no understanding of how or why, and is therefore doing absolutely nothing to actually help us maintain our manufacturing power.
US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_S...
China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
That’s like a 1/3rd reduction in workforce.
Tariffs seem like a way to help American manufacturing compete given all of that
And yet the latest supra's are just badge engineered BMW's, and a lot of their cars are being recalled for engine problems, or because the wheels fall off...
https://bid.barnoneauction.com/lot/230633363/2024-agt-mh12r-...
Given the usage pattern of an excavator, which is that typically its sitting around until you need to use it nonstop for several days, I like the option of just filling it up with gas.