What the going rate for ditch cleaning in your area, and what it all entails? Thanks
We do many different types, snag and drag is the cleaning of ditches with hand tools, pea rakes/chainsaws/winches/come a longs, no machines allowed, to remove blockages. Hand ditching, cleaning and removing drop down veg to the natural ground, hand tools/pitch forks. Hand ditching is up graded to mechanical if ROW will handle a machine access, problems are fences/sheds/dog pens/cars/trailers/trees and so on. ROW roadway ditches, shoulder. Ditching new construction, farm ditching, Vee ditching, matt ditching, spoil island ditching, long reach and dragline ditching. All of these have different costs, some can have the veg mowed, some chipped, some have to remove from site. Some allow spoils to be piled, some leveled out, some have to be hauled out. Some have ROW with less than 10' and 20 yrs growth with a 3' flat bottom and 5+ foot depth ( try a thousand feet with everything brought out by hand) with a small access every 500'. The costs of silt fence, rip rap, soil matting, sod, seeding varies depending on sites along with labor and equipment used, and transport of larger equipment hauling expenses. The going rate will change with the job, size of equipment, resources needed. Here a 100' ditch could be $2.00 to $25.00 a foot or by the hour with your machine, size, extra labor, support equipment/ mow heads /tree shears/ special buckets/ matts and so on. Need to have more info on your project because not all ditch cleaning is the same.
For the most part I am asking about cleaning the silt out of the bottom, with a excavator and spreading out the spoil.
If you could give the length, depth, width across the top of the slope. You still have many factors, do you own a machine, can you haul it to the site, is it going to be a rental machine with a pick up and delivery charge. If you took three different class trackhoes, weekly rentals, 12,000 lb @ $1125.00 = $30.00 per hr., 19,000 lb @ $1675.42 = $42.00 per hr., and 42,000 lb @ 2795.00 = $ 70.00 per hr. So lets just say we rented the 42,000 pound (320 cat size), machine = $70.00/ fuel and lube = $60.00/ operator = $35.00 per hr/ Haul = $10.00 per hr/ support = $20.00 per hr. and you would be at $195.00 per hr, You can change the numbers depending if your just making payments or looking at your profit spread, area going rate. We would try to be in at $250.00 per hour and could cover about 1,000 ft. per day based on 24-48 cycles per hour of dig /dump/spread with a 60" clean out bucket. I'm sure there are others that will be less or more.
Like Sheepfoot has stated, there is much more involved in this question. Are you just going to rip down the ditch, clawing away by guess and by golly, or does it need to be done right? Survey culverts, measure distances, figure slope, etc, etc all take time and an investment in special equipment. What kind of finished product is going to be required? Does it have to look like it was engineered, or can it look like my 8 year old son was training in the excavator? These might sound like silly questions, but around here we have guys that (used to) try and clean ditches by sight alone, or with a guy running stick behind the bucket. They do not get much business anymore.