My name's Lenard Steiner, and I'm the owner of Steiner Trenching.
We do a lot of site prep and foundation and utility contracting.
Where the Ventrac comes in for us, is where we get a homeowner that has a nice lawn, they
want gas hooked up.
People's first concern is what's it going to do to my lawn?
How big of a trench are you going to dig?
What's it going to look like?
How well is it going to clean up?
We can go in there with the Ventrac and cut a 5 and a half inch wide ditch, put in our
gas line pipe, we can blade it shut with the blade, use a power broom to sweep the sides
of the trench, and when we're done we have just a neat little ridge and the grass is
clean on both sides and we've done it with a Ventrac no bigger than the lawn mower they're
using.
It's great, people love it.
In fact, we even worked for one homeowner and had the neighbor come over and say hey
I signed up this other contractor, but can I switch?
I want you guys to do it.
I've seen what they do, I see what you're doing, can you do our line too?
We've actually had that happen multiple times, so it's actually been a marketing thing for
us.
When people see what we can do compared to what other guys out there are doing, they
want us to do it.
We've got a lot of work that way.
All the equipment we have is sized so we can haul it behind the pickup truck.
Just not having to have a big truck and be under all the DOT regulations is very nice.
The problem we had with our medium sized trencher was that it's heavy enough that if the ground
was soft, it would leave ruts.
The backfill blade works, but there was no way to put a broom on it.
We would end up having to clean up the grass by hand, trying to fix ruts and really there
was no good way to do it.
What I think makes the big difference over the mini or smaller trenchers that I've rented
over the years is the speed of the digging chain.
I have rented small trenchers that ran so slow that it took you all day to get anywhere.
Both of them were a failure in my opinion.
In fact, that's why I was so skeptical about using the Ventrac to trench gas lines because
if it's going to be like the others, it's going to be way too slow.
As a utility contractor, I was really impressed with the speed of the machine and we've had
homeowners love it for the job it does on their lawns.
It doesn't damage the turf more than necessary.
It's been really nice that way.