The Beginning

In 1988 we started building vacuum excavation trucks for our growing utility locating and mapping business. We knew that vacuum excavation was a great way to expose buried utilities, but the equipment was heavy and incredibly expensive to build and maintain. We were turning down work because our trucks couldn’t get to some job sites. There had to be a better way.

 

Revolutionizing Vacuum Excavation

In 1996 we set out to revolutionize vacuum excavation and the utility locating industry. Our engineers and machinists got to work designing a new kind of vacuum excavator. The task was daunting; the new machine needed to access all job sites, be low cost, reliable, and maintenance free. Most importantly, it had to have the same digging power as our full-size vacuum trucks.

 

Prototyping and Launch

Prototype machines were built and tested on actual projects, and comments from the field crews were incorporated into each new design. By 1998 we had a working design (and patent!) for a revolutionary vacuum excavator. We called it “Utilivac”, short for “Utility-Vacuum”. Soon we were building Utilivac machines for customers all over the world.

 

More Than Just A Vacuum Excavator

Utilivac changed the way people thought about vacuum excavation. Owing to its low cost, portable design, and power, our customers soon realized Utilivac was more than just a vacuum excavator, it’s an outstanding general purpose vacuum with unlimited uses.