An idling machine is still being serviced.
Plant runs on an hour meter, not an odometer, and the meter does not care whether the machine was working. 41% of this fleet's engine hours produce nothing — and they still consume service intervals, still burn diesel, and still write down a machine whose resale price is quoted by that meter.
- 142,680 h
- engine hours a year
- 41%
- of them idle
- 127
- services a year nobody earned
- 433,407
- SAR a year, honestly recoverable
The service bill is the same size as the fuel bill
Idle fuel on this fleet costs 390,742 a year. The services those same idle hours pulled forward cost 380,964. Everybody counts the first one. Almost nobody counts the second, and it is not smaller.
The mechanism is dull, which is why it gets missed. A machine idling 41% of its hours hits each service on a calendar interval 41% shorter than the work alone would have produced. Across 61 machines that is 127 services a year bought with hours that built nothing.
390,742
Idle fuel
235,387 litres at 1.66 a litre
380,964
Services not earned
127 scheduled services a year
771,705
What a vendor would quote
Both, assuming every idle hour is removable
That third number is the one to distrust, including when we quote it. Only 59% of the measured idle on this fleet can actually be removed, which puts the honest ceiling at 433,407.
Two years of services, at two idle rates
Each mark is a scheduled service. Move the slider and watch the orange marks thin out toward where they would fall.
0 in services, 0 in fuel
Excavator, 20 t
8× · 500 h · 60% recoverable
— svc
Wheel loader
6× · 500 h · 55% recoverable
— svc
Dozer
3× · 500 h · 60% recoverable
— svc
Mobile crane
4× · 250 h · 45% recoverable
— svc
Telehandler
9× · 500 h · 50% recoverable
— svc
Concrete mixer
12× · 400 h · 20% recoverable
— svc
Compactor
5× · 500 h · 60% recoverable
— svc
Generator, 100 kVA
14× · 500 h · 75% recoverable
— svc
Each machine carries its own recoverable share, so they do not move together. The generator has the most to give and the concrete mixer almost none — its drum has to keep turning, and pretending that idle is recoverable would be the easiest number on this page to fake.
The generator is serviced every 1.6 months as it runs today and every 2.4 months with its recoverable idle gone. The concrete mixer moves from 2.1 to 2.2 months and no further, because its drum has to keep turning whether or not the truck is going anywhere.
It is not the excavators
Every conversation about site idle starts with the diggers, because they are the machines people picture. The board says the generators and the crane are where the money is.
Generators run unattended through the night at almost no load, which is why they clock the most hours and get the least supervision. The crane is second for a different reason — a 250-hour interval, half the length of everything else, so each idle hour costs twice as much service life.
| Machine | Units | Idle | Recoverable | Services wasted | Service cost | Idle fuel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Generator, 100 kVA | 14 | 47% | 75% | 50.5 | 90,962 | 167,774 |
| Mobile crane | 4 | 55% | 45% | 12.7 | 81,101 | 28,924 |
| Concrete mixer | 12 | 29% | 20% | 19.8 | 57,524 | 46,099 |
| Excavator, 20 t | 8 | 38% | 60% | 12.8 | 53,626 | 47,688 |
| Wheel loader | 6 | 42% | 55% | 10.0 | 37,921 | 41,414 |
| Telehandler | 9 | 44% | 50% | 13.3 | 31,933 | 33,131 |
| Dozer | 3 | 31% | 60% | 3.3 | 18,749 | 16,673 |
| Compactor | 5 | 33% | 60% | 4.4 | 9,148 | 9,039 |
Sorted by what each type costs in wasted services and idle fuel together. The concrete mixers are third on the board and near the bottom on recoverability, which is exactly the sort of thing a headline idle percentage would get wrong.
And the meter is on the invoice when you sell it
Used plant is priced by hours on the clock. Idle hours are indistinguishable from working hours to a buyer, so every one of them is a discount you are pre-paying.
This is the part that does not show up in any annual budget line, because it arrives once, 5 years later, as a lower number than you expected on a machine you thought you had looked after.
| Machine | Meter at 5 years, as run | With idle removed | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excavator, 20 t | 10,500 h | 8,106 h | −23% |
| Wheel loader | 9,900 h | 7,613 h | −23% |
| Dozer | 9,000 h | 7,326 h | −19% |
| Mobile crane | 7,200 h | 5,418 h | −25% |
| Telehandler | 8,400 h | 6,552 h | −22% |
| Concrete mixer | 11,400 h | 10,739 h | −6% |
| Compactor | 6,600 h | 5,293 h | −20% |
| Generator, 100 kVA | 19,200 h | 12,432 h | −35% |
What a plant fleet actually uses
Half of a construction fleet has no ignition, no odometer and sometimes no battery, which rules out most of what a vehicle telematics product assumes.
- Hours, not kilometres
- Servicing, billing and utilisation on plant are all hour-based. A system that only speaks in distance cannot answer any of the questions on this page.
- Assets with no engine
- Towers, attachments and containers report movement from the accelerometer, so they appear on the same map as the machines.
- Which site is hoarding
- Plant migrates between sites and stops coming back. Allocation by site, with days idle, is the argument that ends it.
- Fuel delivered to site
- Bowser deliveries and machine-level burn rarely reconcile, and the gap is worth watching before anyone calls it theft.
- Pre-start inspections
- A signed walk-around before the shift, with photos, is both a safety record and the earliest warning of the failure that stops the site.
- Service due, by machine
- Intervals driven from live hour readings rather than from a spreadsheet somebody updates monthly.
Before you take these numbers anywhere
Idle savings are the easiest figure in this industry to inflate, and the inflation is always in the same four places.
- Some idle is the job
- A mixer drum has to turn and a crane cannot restart between every lift. Every machine here carries its own recoverable share, and the ceiling on this page is built from those rather than from the measured idle.
- Hour meters are not all honest
- Some count key-on rather than engine-run, and some machines have had a meter replaced. The first month of any deployment is reconciling telematics hours against what the meter says.
- Shortening the interval is not always wrong
- Dusty sites are hard on filters and oil, and servicing earlier than the book says is sometimes the correct call. The argument here is against unplanned drift, not against judgement.
- Plant has no ignition to watch
- Attachments, towers and non-powered kit report movement rather than hours, so they need a different unit and a different question. They are on this board only for where they sit, not for what they burn.
The number worth defending is 433,407 a year, and it assumes you actually remove every removable idle hour, which nobody does. Halve it and it is still 216,704 that currently leaves as diesel and service invoices against hours that built nothing.