This is why choosing the right excavator is imperative if you want to make the most of your investment and get the job done in the most efficient way possible. There are so many specialized types of excavators out there designed to do certain jobs well. There are compact urban models and heavy-duty machines designed to work in mining operations.
Each types of excavators has its strengths and is designed to work with certain types of tasks in mind. This guide to excavator types will cover the most common types of excavators available on the market today. You will learn the general categories, key features, and what they do best to help you choose the right excavator for your job.
Excavators come in various models, each designed for specific tasks and conditions. Standard excavators offer versatility for general applications, mini excavators excel in tight spaces, and crawler models handle rough terrains. Wheeled excavators are ideal for paved surfaces, while long-reach excavators are perfect for deep or high jobs. Specialty models like dragline, suction, and amphibious excavators meet unique requirements in specific industries. Choosing the right type of excavator depends on project goals, terrain, and budget considerations.
Let’s talk about each type in more detail to understand what each type can do and what it does well.
What Is a Standard Excavator and Where Is It Used?
A standard excavator is the most common type you will see on construction sites. It is used for many general construction activities because it is versatile and can do many things fairly well. It includes a
boom, dipper, and bucket attached to a cab that can rotate 360 degrees. Standard excavators are made in various sizes from compact models right for small-footprint job sites to larger models for big, hard work.
They can do all sorts of things—dig, trench, work as a material handler, and as a demolition tool. You can customize the functionality of the standard excavator by adding hydraulic attachments like a breaker or a
grapple.
General construction, landscaping, most infrastructure and roadwork jobs. Basically, any contractor doing various types of work who wants a machine that can do the most things possible, and they can add
attachments when they need to do some specialized work. A standard excavator is a cornerstone for any kind of fleet. It can handle whatever basic work needs to be done for most people most of the time.
What Are Crawler Excavators and Their Advantages?
Crawler Excavators are exactly that—excavators with tracks instead of wheels. They are more stable and get better traction in rough environments than their wheeled comrades. The tracks spread out the
machine’s weight, so it doesn’t sink as much as a wheeled machine on soft or muddy ground. The reason crawler excavators are so powerful and rugged is that they are used in industries where you must have a piece of equipment that is going to be durable, reliable, and perform to its maximum capability every single day.
You will see them in mining, forestry, and large-scale construction applications. Because they have tracks, they can go to places wheeled models could only dream about such as walking up slopes or working in soft ground. Crawler excavators usually have heavier attachments than wheeled models. It is not uncommon to see rippers for breaking hard ground, or crushers for completely annihilating structures. They are typically not as fast moving as wheeled models but that’s okay. Crawler excavators are about doing work that is often bigger and bulkier than what a wheeled machine would handle.
How Do Wheeled Excavators Differ from Crawlers?
Wheeled excvs have tires so they can drive down the road or be extra mobile on a job site. They are fastest when it comes to traveling any distance, but they are really at their best on hard, paved surfaces. So on a paving job, in an industrial area, in the city—anywhere where the ground is hard—you want an excav with wheels.
Wheeled excavators can drive from spot to spot without having to sit on a trailer and are very productive for roadwork and city jobs where you are moving from point A to point B all the time. Wheeled excavators are great on finished surfaces since the tires won’t sink in and wreck the concrete or blacktop. That’s a big deal when you’re doing utility work in the city, or any kind of municipal maintenance where your machines are what’s tearing up the ground someone else just finished building.
A wheeled excavator is used when you need to move a lot and you don’t need the brawn that a crawler will give you. The wheeled excavator is all about getting around and being productive on finished/hard surfaces. This machine is perfect for a contractor that works in the city or operates in an industrial park. These machines can be adjusted so that they can work on the street or alley where a pavement has just been laid, and regular excavators couldn’t even get to the job site. If you work in tight spaces, a wheeled excavator can be a real boost to your productivity.
What Jobs Are Best for Mini Excavators?
A mini excavator, or compact excavator, makes money because it can work in small spaces where a regular-sized machine can’t get. You will see them working in neighborhoods, in the city on tight construction sites, and doing small work around the commercial site where you don’t have a
lot of room to move. The size and weight of these machines don’t affect their power, and many times they do the same work as bigger machines. They can dig a foundation, they can trench, they can do landscaping work, and they can do small projects for a smaller cost.
There are a ton of contractors who like working in town because that’s where the people are and that’s where the money is. The mini works out for contractors around town because you can get them where they need to go and do the work without irritating too many people. Also mini excavators are useful for short-term or flexible use work like planting trees, putting in an irrigation system, or digging holes to drop a fence in.
How Are Long-Reach Excavators Used?
A long-reach excavator is a machine with an extended boom and stick. They can reach up a long way and out a long way. You use a long-reach excavator for specific tasks like dredging, building a riverbank, and
especially when you need to take down a tall structure from a safe distance. You may need a long unit to reach out and pull the gutters off the building before the main demolition work.
Roll the machine back to a safe distance and yank the structure down. This machine is invaluable for situations when you need to work from a distance, like dredging canals and waterways. If you have an area that’s hazardous or unsafe, set up the machine where you are comfortable, and let the machine reach out and do the dirty work.
Long-reach excavators are used so the operator can stay safely away from hazardous areas, unstable material, or an area that’s hard to get into. The arm on a long-reach can go anywhere from 40 feet to 100 feet and is used to reach in and tear stuff down from a safe distance. This type of excavator works great for scraping out the bottom of a river, removing vegetation from a tall, steep embankment, or any work where you don’t want to tear everything up. The long-reach excavator is going to be crucial on environmental projects where you’ve got to work from a distance.
What Is a Dragline Excavator and Its Key Applications?
Draglines are some of the heaviest excavators and have a long boom and bucket that hang off a system of cables. The bucket is drug along the ground and scoops up material as it makes its way to the machine. Most often, you will see a dragline working on a big surface mining job or a huge civil engineering project where they are digging a canal or taking off the top layers (overburden) on a coal job.
Draglines do not move once you set them up and take up a lot of room to operate. Because of their size and power, a dragline can move more material than nearly any other type of machine. The excellent thing about a dragline is that as long as you can get the bucket to the material, you can scoop it up. The dragline is used primarily to remove material from the surface and is a vital tool for surface mining or excavating to great depths such as you would see in a dredging operation.
What Are Suction Excavators and When Are They Ideal?
Suction excavators, or vacuum excavators, dig by using a very large vacuum to suck up the dirt instead of digging. The suction machine is used to get the material out of an area where you cannot afford to tear stuff up. You can push the nozzle of this machine into the ground and suck as much material as you can reach. You will see suction excavators used when they are digging very close to an area and can’t afford to be sloppy. This machine is handy for working around dirt and utility lines that you can’t damage, or
on an archaeological dig where you can’t scrape anything from the top without making a mess of the excavation.
Think about it like this: instead of using a shovel to put dirt in a hole, you push the nozzle on the suction excavator down in the hole, and the big vacuum sucks up everything in the hole. That dirt and debris go into a collection tank for removal later on.
A suction excavator is used when damaging the area you are digging in isn’t an option. You will see it used when a regular excavator could potentially cut a fiber optic cable or when you can’t just run stuff through a pipe without a lot of hassle. The suction excavator can get rid of everything in a hole to expose what someone else will need to work on and do so without making a mess.
A common sight for these machines is a vacuum excavation job. BombSquad Comment Suction excavators are also used when situations arise that require theprompt removal of dirt or debris without any intervening shovel work (i.e., an accident in the road, a flood where the stuff got washed into a drain and needs to be removed).
How Do Hydraulic Shovel Excavators Work?
A hydraulic shovel excavator is designed for heavy lifting jobs and can move large piles of material without slowing down. When you see a massive hole in the ground and equipment moving massive amounts of rock, chances are you’ve spied a hydraulic shovel. This type of excavator is built to do the heavy lifting and rock breaking on large, high-production earthmoving jobs.
Hydraulic shovel excavators are used for extended periods every day while working in the toughest conditions. The hydraulic power allows these machines to work much faster than you could with an electric motor. The hydraulic shovel is built durable and can withstand pretty rigorous treatment. All that strength and power are packed into a machine that can manage a steep hill without losing its stance. These machines can be counted on to work hard, day in and day out, with a minimum of humbug
maintenance. That makes hydraulic shovel excavators very important on jobs with a very high production worth like in mining and aggregate production locations.
What Are Amphibious Types Of Excavators, and Where Are They Used?
Amphibious Excavators are designed to operate in swampy, marshy areas, or areas where the ground is just wet. The undercarriage has pontoons attached so the machine can actually float and be a compensating machine in shallow water. These machines are used where there is water present and normal machines won’t work, especially in soft areas or underwater.
Amphibious excavators use attachments designed to rip out all the bad vegetation clogging up a stream or picking up silt that’s gathered in a pond. Their rubberized pontoons and the extra weight of the machine make it work great in areas where standard equipment just doesn’t do the job. Amphibious excavators are used for environmental projects like dredging out swamps or maintaining a wooded foreshore, and for maintaining flood control sides around a river.
Why Are Backhoe Loaders Considered Multi-functional?
The workhorse of job sites everywhere. This machine is two-for-one. On the front of the machine, you have what is essentially a loader bucket, and on the rear of the machine, you have a digging arm. The backhoe is used in places where you have a small project that requires both lifting, such as with the loader, and digging with the backhoe. These machines are typically used for utility work, light construction, landscaping, and farming.
The whole idea is that one person can run the machine and use one end or the other to do the work without having to buy and maintain two separate machines. Backhoe loaders are great in town or out in the country because you don’t have enough work to justify three or four machines on site and the wide variety of attachments available make them useful in a lot of different ways beyond just moving dirt or placing pipe.
What Is a Compact Excavator, and When Should It Be Used?
So, if you want more power than a mini excavator can deliver but you don’t need all the horsepower of a standard machine, a compact excavator is about right. These machines are perfect for jobs that demand
more power than a small machine can give you, but don’t require all the capabilities of a standard machine.
Most commonly, compact excavators run trenchers and grinders or are used for site preparation. Transporting a compact excavator is relatively easy, making them an excellent choice for
contractors who take a lot of small- to medium-scale jobs and need a powerful machine that will show up every day and dig.
Summary
Your choice of the right excavator can drastically affect production, maintenance cost, and ultimately may even make or break your project. There’s a right machine designed to handle whatever job you have.
Remember, whatever task you have to do, whether a standard one like digging a trench or putting in a pool, right down to clearing out a bunch of debris, there’s a perfect machine for you.
Understanding the differences between the types will allow you to buy, rent, or lease the right machine, giving you confidence that you didn’t get “taken to the cleaners.” If you need help figuring out which type is best for you, you have a special job you haven’t seen listed here, or you need a quote, please ask. Our folks
can quickly tell you what you’ll need and even give you a quote on the machine, or custom order something that gets your job done right. For more information or professional advice, feel free to contact us.
