looking to purchase a roller, we do residential and small(90k sgft and less) commercial pad sites what is the smallest size I could look at and still remain productive? What about the older self contained pull behind units?
What kind of soil do you have and how much fill is needed? A 48" would be fine. If the soils isn't to bad even a smooth drum is doable. Just don't cheat the lift thickness and keep the fill smooth.
I am assuming it was a typo on 90K sf or less, that'd be a big assed house. How many pad sites do you complete in a year and what is your soil type as DB asked? I've got a Cat CS 533E which is a 84" smooth drum roller with a pad shell, it works great for what we do. Bought it new in 2004 and I think we've taken the shell of 3 or 4 times in the last 13 years. It's used for dirt work but I can take the shell off and roll base or crushed stone. What we've come to use more and more is remote control trench rollers. Now they're obviously not for large fills but they are handy as a shirt pocket for smaller compaction jobs. Give us a little more info on what you do so we can better give suggestions.
And yeah depending on your soil types...see where we are, we're pretty sandy so we can get away with murder compaction wise as long as we just split the tracks with our scrapers. That being said, our 48' sheepsfoot doesn't really have a place on sites like that. But, it does really well on in town projects where we're trucking dirt in and aren't running a scraper around at all and smaller areas etc.