John and Valerie Dewitz, owners of Above & Beyond Hydroseed, found themselves needing to buy a street sweeper after a bad subcontractor experience. John and Valerie specialize in erosion control and hydroseed out of Ridgefield, Washington, and been in business since 2002.
Above & Beyond Hydroseed has a large builder they do work for, and they came to John asking to sweep their streets. John said, “Well, I don’t have a sweep truck, but I could probably sub that out for you,” and they said, “Okay, let’s do that.” So they did that for about three years, and were paying a lot of money out for street sweeping, and weren’t getting outstanding results. Above and Beyond were seeing that it just wasn’t looking as clean as they thought it should. Then they started getting complaints from their customer; that’s when the subcontractor started bringing in multiple trucks to try and do the job of what one truck should. The subcontractor was using the wrong type of street sweepers, regenerative sweepers for the porous asphalt application.
The subcontractor wasn’t getting the job done using regenerative air street sweepers to pick up the particulates in the porous asphalt application. They started researching street sweepers and came across Johnston, a Bucher company, and the VT652 vacuum street sweeper. Through the Johnston website, they connected to Western Regional Sales Manager, Shawn Hutchings. Shawn came out, demoed the vacuum street sweeper, and John and crew liked what they saw. The application-specific questions Shawn asked to make sure the street sweeper was the right fit reassured Above & Beyond. John Detwitz, “It seemed capable of doing everything that we were looking for, and we decided to make the purchase. With the Johnston VT652 that we purchased, it seems to be performing well, and we’re starting to get the results that we’re looking for.”
What John sees so far is that he’s spending less time on each site and getting a quality job. “The fact that I’m not taking three trucks out to do one job is going to be a huge saving as well. On certain sites, on some larger sites mainly, we’re seeing about a two-hour difference as far as the sweep time. That’s on a site with about 100 home sites, probably half of that being in construction. We sweep about, oh, 30 sites a month right now. Overall, that adds up to pretty big savings.” John stated excitedly.
All the ground in sediment that wasn’t getting picked up by the subcontractor had grounded into the porous pavement month after month. Above and Beyond Hydroseed is seeing better results each time they go into the subdivisions to sweep, and they’re picking up all the accumulated sediment.
John said the customer comment that Above & Beyond used to receive was, “Well, I don’t see that sweeper’s even been here. Now they definitely see that we’ve been there.” Contact Johnston, a Bucher company today, to learn more.
Editor's Note: Scranton Gillette Communications and the SGC Water Group are not liable for the accuracy, efficacy and validity of the claims made in this piece. The views expressed in this content do not reflect the position of the editorial teams of Water & Wastes Digest, Water Quality Products and Storm Water Solutions.