Hey guys looking for a little guidance from those of you experienced with estimating. Heres the deal, for a class I need to do a whole conceptual plan for a proposed sub-division. The site is 35 acres and I will be doing equal cuts and fills so no dirt will be trucked out. I can do the pavement, pipe, stone, concrete, etc... work on my own, thats not the problem. What I am asking some of you is how should I go about the dirt work estimating. Its a smaller site so as far as equipment goes I would guess around 3 trackhoes, 2 trackloaders, 1 or 2 backhoes, 1 large dozer and a smaller finish dozer. I guess my question is when you estimate what are you assuming your productivity is for pipe work (sewer, water, gas, etc...) in cost/day. I have a total of 3320 linear feet of road so my guess is I could assume the dirt work for roads would be around 3-4 weeks and another 2 weeks for the trenching...it will be shallow sewer because the parcel runs down hill so i should be able to carry a 4' sewer trench all the way down to the tie-in i'm not asking you to do my work for me...just give a little guidence.. thanks -Bryan also i have a CAD .dwg file that I already made up if you want to see it
Do you have a Means book? It is a good way to calulate production. There is a section for crews. A pipe crew for example, may consist of an excavator, loader, dozer, 3 operates, 2 laborers, a foreman, and a truck. They will also have production for that crew. You can also look up your material, say 24" RCP, and it will give you the crew necessary, and their daily production. For estimating things like this, the Means Book is the only accurate way without actual known production, and costs based on a companies crew. While I dont do 100% of my estimating using the Means book, it is a great asset. When I took estimating, we used the Means book for all our estimates, because we didnt have company data to go off of, so the book was required for the class. Some say the Means book is worthless, others call it the bible of construction. It is a great tool. You can also use the CAT books, but they are harder to come by. It also may help you to use software like Heavy Bid. You can do your takeoffs, and input each line item. Based on a database in the software, you can come up with equipment and crews to create your final estimate and a schedule. That is the only way I can suggest you do it. Unless you have been provided with costs of equipment, personel, and office overhead, the Means Book is your best bet.
i did get all the values out of the RS Means books...asphalt, concrete, pipe, etc... actually i even found trenching costs per L.F. which is nice maybe i should be asking for you guys out there that lay a lot of pipe...once the trench is done how fast can you lay pipe? How long would it take to lay 3300 feet of 8" Ductile iron with 67 taps, a few Tees and and few 45's?
Dirt digger: “What I am asking some of you is how should I go about the dirt work estimating.” I think you need to provide a little more information. What’s the total quantity of on site material to be moved? What type of material is it? How deep are the cuts/fills? Is there topsoil? If so, how much? Can you stockpile all the topsoil at one place on site, screen it and sell it, or do you have to spread it back on each lot? Are you bidding this as the prime contractor to do all the work, or will certain portions be subbed out? By the large dozer, are you planning on pushing all the cuts to fills with a D9 or D10? You really don’t have any earthmoving equipment on that list, unless you’re planning on bringing in on-road trucks to be loaded by the machine mentioned on your list. You did say that the site sits on a slope, so maybe the topography of the job allows all cuts/fills to be within a short enough distance that a large dozer could move the material without the need of any other earthmoving equipment. There is no compaction machine mentioned in your list, and pushing all cuts to fills would ideally require an 815 or 825 to knock down windrows on each lift and compact. Will you need a water-hauler of some sort to add moisture to the material? What’s the likely precipitation during the time period which construction will take place? That will have a bearing on the best machines to use for the project. Will homebuilders be showing up and getting in your way while you’re still installing pipe and/or finish grading? Many a contractor has lost every penny in a finish grading budget due to homebuilders driving all over while they’re trying to prep for asphalt/concrete.
Do you have a grading plan that you can digitize in a earthwork program? It may be a balanced site but do you have to move 25,000cyds or 2500cyds to get to that balance? What are you moving the dirt with using the listed equipment? I don't see any 6x6s or pans listed? Waterline in a subdivision in clay, I'd say atleast 1000'/day on mainline, maybe more. Copper laterals probably atleast 8/day. I'm trying to think back to what I used to see in my inspector days, the company I've been estimating with isn't much of subdivision company.
the site has about a 5% slope running back to front, so there will be no major cuts and fills, i believe i can just get away with cutting out the road width then pushing it down slope to fill down near a road...the current parcel is a field so no clearing needs to be done, I was figuring a D8 in there as a "large dozer" and a 4 or 5 to go in later and grade up along sidewalks, etc.. the CAD and PDF are too big to upload on this site...but heres a JPEG to give a rough idea...the contour lines are in 1 foot intervals so you can tell there is not a whole lot of slopes...a pretty gravy job, i have just never estimated before and figured i would come to the wiser men then me instead of making things up the existing house is to be sub-divided off sorry if i am being a little sparse on information...its been a very long week/weekend and toping it off today with 6 hours in the engineering library didn't help
Something else not mentioned. Clearing and grubbing- Is the site heavily wooded? Is there any timber of marketable value? Can you burn or have to grind? What do the erosion control plans look like? What is "your" responsibility for maintenance of erosion control devices? Are you responsible for NPDES permitting and storm water monitoring? When I was in college we used an ancient (early 90's) digitizing program for dirt works and did all manual take-offs with the help of the Means book, for everything else. My education was based more in building construction than heavy civil though.
I'm going to expand on the erosion control standpoint, working with a lot of ponds your going to need atleast a couple BMP (silt) ponds for all your stormwater runoff collection. Those will need to be engineered and calculated to carry/ hold the maximum amount over water runoff during a freak storm. Most silt ponds have rows of filter fabric that will be staked across the bottom to filter out trash and sediment. The drain will usually be a 3" skimmer type system to slowly let the water release. It only gets the water below the waters surface that was any polutants will remain in the pond. Once the water on the pond fills to about 4' above normal it will start to go out the main overflow on the top of the concrete stand pipe. If it gets higher (during and big rain) the emergency overflow should kick in and keep it from washing the dam away. A 35 acre site will proably need about 2 of these ponds installed. maybe just one big one depending on how your grades work out. I know how you feel in the Civil Engineering program, I took 2.5 years of it before it got the best of me and I switched over to the Construction management program. Hope my rambling was of some help.
we have the site completely designed...ponds, basins, lots, roads, the works....i will try and post a picture of it tomorrow when i get back in the CAD lab and can open it...i dont have CAD on my laptop and dont feel like spending over $1000 to get it
PM me with your email address if you would like and I can send you a few estimates with unit prices for my area as well as a good format to use to put together an engineering estimate. We keep our unit number updated fairly regularrly based upon our work that goes out to bid. I may have a bid from a sunrise assisted living facility in your area you can use as a model. Pretty much PM me with whatever you feel you need and I will do my best to help you out tommorrow when i go into the office- Rich
Might be good to add a steiger pullin doubles to strip the topsoil and help out with the road cutting. I agree, your going to need compaction and water equipment. Who is doing the road prep for paving? Will you sub it out, or haul a smooth drum and grader in? Have fun.
Pecord you have a PM...thanks
heres the CAD drawing...we present tomorrow morning...everything is done so thank you guys...and much appreciation goes out to Pecord...thanks again for all the help
anyway of showing the whole finished submission for all to see? Stock
we already did the feasibility study...that was about 100 pages of various information...tax maps, land owners, easements, blah, blah, blah.... this section of the project is the conceptual plan which is just this CAD drawing and estimate...then the final part of the project is something else this is my Senior Design class so we have been working on this project all semester and now that we are nearing the end it is all starting to compile together, the land we are planning is an actual piece of ground located 5 miles from my University....so we have done plenty of site visits actually the instructor of my course is also an engineer at a local, and very large, home building contractor and they own the ground and have been in the process of developing it for the last 15 years but have not been able to because of storm water issues (we were told in this project to disregard the storm water issue of this particular site) so when we have questions our instructor actually knows something HAHA