Brandon Noel opens his article on electric construction equipment by telling contractors not to buy any. The second sentence explains why they eventually will.
At World of Asphalt, he caught up with Chris Broome, Senior Product Manager at LeeBoy, to keep an ongoing argument going. The two have been going back and forth about electric machines since LeeBoy revealed its fully electric paver. This time the conversation lands on duty cycle: telematics data suggesting heavy iron spends 35 to 45 percent of its working day waiting, brooms running under a 25 percent duty cycle, and what all that idle time costs a contractor in engine hours, pump wear, and fuel burned while nothing gets paved.
Broome's argument is that the industry has already been through this once. In the early 2000s contractors preferred air tools and dismissed battery power. LeeBoy now buys almost no pneumatic tools at all. Watch the full No Edge Lines episode for more from World of Asphalt.
0:00
Ever since the reveal of Lee Boy's fully electric paper, Chris Broom and I have been having an ongoing conversation about electric machines.
0:08
In a recent issue of the magazine, I wrote about some of my thoughts from those conversations, and so I decided to catch up with him at the show.
0:17
But the more you hang out with me, the more you're just going to have to.
0:21
We have a good rapport going.
0:22
I think we do just.
0:24
You know, I know how to spell your name appropriately.
0:26
No, we.
0:27
Yeah, we've been across the bridge of that.
0:29
Right.
0:29
Yeah.
0:29
I wanted to ask you, did you see the electric article?
0:32
Yeah, I did see it.
0:34
And I read about 3/4 of it, if I'm going to be honest.
0:37
Hey, that that's an improvement.
0:39
I I generally don't get even that far.
0:41
I came down.
0:42
I spent time with you, walked the factory.
0:45
I write an article inspired by our conversations, and that's why you got 800% more of my engagement than you would have otherwise.
0:53
Right.
0:54
I guess I'll have to accept that.
0:56
I have since talked to several people here at World of Asphalt about a lot of the telematics companies, people who, like, measure what the machine's doing.
1:04
Yeah.
1:05
And I've seen an interesting trend.
1:07
OK, that's that.
1:08
A lot of heavy machinery, I'm talking heavy iron mills, rollers, they spend anywhere from 35 to 45% of their time waiting.
1:18
You're talking about duty cycle and in the duty cycle on brooms is less than 25% typically.
1:24
So an 8 hour a day, you're probably sweeping a couple hours at most.
1:29
The equation I did in the article was about looking at the idle times and things that you're losing dollars and cents every second that goes by the this doesn't happen And you're, you're putting, you're putting where on all those moving components, you're spinning pumps, your, your, you know, your whole diesel engine, right?
1:49
You're putting hours on it the whole time.
1:51
You don't do that with the electric stuff.
1:53
I see it as my mission to get people on board.
1:58
So in the early 2000s when when people came around selling power tools, they, the hand impact stuff like that, the battery powered ones, well, they, they weren't really preferred at that time.
2:08
They didn't, they didn't work a long time.
2:10
And, and, and the thought was, oh, I've got, I've got these airlines, right.
2:14
I'm going to use all air tools.
2:15
They got better power that's flipped in the last, in the last 10 years, especially to the point to where where Lee Boy doesn't really buy very many pneumatic tools.
2:28
We're all, we're buying all electric impacts.
2:30
There is a, there is a turnover that's going to happen.
2:34
And I've told contractors this where they're going to prefer this because it's going to have less maintenance costs, right?
2:41
And it's going to put to do the same job, it'll perform just the same.
2:44
We get hesitancy.
2:46
There's 0% bad reaction once they, once they've been on the machine actually.
2:52
And they're like, oh, this is no different.
2:54
So people are apprehensive.
2:55
You get on it and, and you kind of come away going, oh, I get it.
2:59
This is, this is fine.
3:00
It has this application.
3:01
It works just like the paver or the broom I'm used to.
3:06
It's not a changeover.
3:07
That's why we made it so exactly similar as far as the controls.
3:12
The first sentence in the article is you shouldn't buy an electric construction piece of equipment right now.
3:18
And I thought if I started with that, people would know, like, I'm not trying to convince you to do this, but the second sentence was, but eventually you're going to find it.
3:28
It pretty difficult not to want to trying to look cool, though, when you're like exiting, you're like, well, just if you fall, nobody's going to laugh except me.
3:36
Oh, dude, everyone would laugh.
3:38
But it would be memorable and, and, and well worth it.
3:41
Hey, thanks for putting up with me for a few minutes and getting on camera.
3:46
We had fun.
3:47
We did.
