Looking at upgrading my Volvo EC240B to an EC300E. Thoughts on this unit? Personally, I like the Volvo. Parts are outrageous price, and service and availability is slow. But the machines are lots cheaper than CAT and I think they are every bit as good at getting the work done, cheap to run, and durable.
If I'm not mistaken, the 300 has the Volvo engine vs the Deutz for smaller machines. If that's correct, I would move on that. Last I heard, emissions were still struggling in the Deutz platform. There may have been improvements, I just haven't heard about them. Good luck in your decision.
We had a couple EC330BL's back in the day. There were a little unstable but overall decent machines. The pilot controls never felt as good as the Deere/Hitachi machines and they couldn't produce as much volume of trenching. The big selling feature was fuel economy at the time and that seemed to hold true. We used them for side machines lowering pipe and bedding in water and sewer installation for sub-divisions. Maybe someone can comment on the new ones.
I can see that. Looking at the specs, the volvos tended to be overbuilt/under powered. Certainly less nimble than other brands of the day, and you can see that in the spec sheets. They likely fitted too big a bucket too. Thats the case with my 240b. For a 240, the volvo was plenty powerful for the day. But as you jumped up to the 290b, and the 330b, you didnt get a power jump commensurate with weight. But of course that was 14years ago. I would hope they have fine tuned that a bit.
Is this machine going to be doing a lot of production trenching with a crew and multiple other pieces accompanying? The main trenching excavator sets the pace and the rest try to keep up. What kind of work are you going to be using this machine for?
I know nothing about Volvo excavators, but if their power plants are the same as the loaders, stay away from the newer machines that don't use DEF. we have 2 G series units, and had to get them deleted and the burn units removed. The 3 H series machines work fine as long as you use clean DEF. Any issues we have ever had with the Hs were from contaminated fluid.
We have cat, case and Volvo. I’m not in the office but they almost exclusively look at Volvo excavators for what ever reason there almost half price compared to every other dealer in town. Our best machine is a Volvo based on reliability and power but it’s definitely got some weird design problems to the point where we’re considering drilling holes to get to certain things faster haha I would say that they save money in the right places and most of our problems have been with emissions systems and or operator error!
Good day Migrating into the world of emission control is a cost you may prefer to avoid, if that 240B has served you good and has no serious illness, could be stay with what you are very familiar with, the novelty of a new machine soon passes. Kind regards Uffex