Snow Setup: NEW V-Plow, NEW Salt Dogg Salter!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Annis here. Landscape business course. And today is just a quick video out in the shop. Lee's shooting the video because Josh is not here. And Caleb put together all of this wonderful stuff and I figured we should present some of his work for you. So this is our track loader. I've shown this in the past. We got this used from a Star rentals and got it with about 800 hours on it. We paid $9000 and then we painted all for about 50, 1500. So it looked nice because it was all beat up before. So it looks somewhat cool. It uses our colors. We put new tracks on it recently. But this is what we really want to show and that is our salt setup. So we have two salting and plowing trucks. We don't do a whole lot. We don't try to advertise plowing necessarily. It's just a lot of headache to do scheduling in the office and administrative side of things. But we do do the border patrol sculpture. We up against the Canadian border. So the border patrol headquarters throughout the county. Those are our main clients. And that's really what we focus on. And then really just trying to keep the guys busy when there's snow sitting on the ground for like three weeks solid, which rarely happens in our market. But when it does, this is able to kind of keep them busy doing the salt. So wanted to show you this new one that we just got set up. We bought this last year, but we just installed it now. And there's a few upgrades that we really like about the salt dog, this new one. So this one does have a vibrator in it, an agitator, which is great if you have bags of salt sitting over the whole year. And there might be chunks of salt that are needing to be broken up. And you don't have to worry about needing a second person in the back of your bed chopping up the salt or making sure it's spreading evenly. I have done salting in the past years ago, and I remember the worst thing was you thinking you finished half a parking lot, you coming back around. Nothing's on the ground because it was caught at the bottom before it actually hits the spreader. So this is the new. This one is a new one. It's a little bit larger than the one we used to have before. I think. Don't quote me on this. I think this is the 800 pound model. So you get 800 pounds of salt. What's cool about has three points of contact in terms of the hitch. And then on both sides it has a connector for the bolts to be able to quickly adapt to the size. But also lock in from the top. So that way it's not just from the hitch only. It is actually having support from the top really, really like that. Also what's cool about this one is it has this. The COVID at the top is actually connected. Our other old. The older version of these, you actually just had straps that you put on the side and connect. Problem is they're rubber. They broke off. Guys. You know, it's hard with gloves, like get those on sometimes in the middle of a bunch of snow. But this is great, really simple. And what's cool, they thought this through and that is it opens from the back. Which means if people are in the back of the. If they're in the bed of the truck, they can just dump salt right into the back from bags or from buckets or whatever you have. It's really, really cool in terms of not worrying about this thing flying off because it actually has a hinge. And also the fact that it opens up from the back. So it does have an agitator and that is controlled from the bed of the truck. So this is G7. This is one of two diesel trucks that we do have. Both of our diesel trucks we use for the salting for the plowing as well as during the year we use it for kind of hauling around bigger pieces of equipment. Like the track loader. Got brand new tires on this bad boy just right now, just, you know, again, end of the year, trying to spend some money on just for tax reasons. So 1600 dollars not so bad for a full size pickup truck. And I don't know how many miles around this one, you know, 50,000, something like that. So pretty good deal. It'll definitely last probably the lifetime that we continue.

Inside of here. They're still setting this up, but this is the controller for the plow, which I'll show you in a second. It's also from Myers. I'll show you the front. What this looks like the V nose. And then I'll get the. This is the. I don't know if you can see this, but around here, this is what we've mounted here for the salt controller. So if I power this on.

All right, the. What's really cool about this controller is if there is ever a problem, it has a pretty good diagnosis right there. And with your manual you can see if there is a certain issue. And it'll give you a number or a digit if it's like a certain type of wire or if something's blocking the salter or something like that. So on here you can do vibration, which I'm going to push that. And you can hear it. It's pretty loud actually from the back. So that's in the back.

And turn that off. But go ahead and power that down. We just run it straight out the window, basically, and then wrap it through the bag of the truck with the wiring. Show you up front here. This is our second plow. Our first one was a straight one. It's from Western and we got that up in Canada. This one we also got up in Canada last year, only because we don't have any dealers within a couple hours south of us in the US So we go across the board. It's a bit of a pain to pick it up, but with the exchange, it kind of makes it worth it. So this is the Meijer Super V3. There's a larger version of this, but this is really all we really needed. And we wanted to invest in something that did have the ability to scoot and actually put the VNOs and push in a single lane. What's hard about having the one blade that just goes one direction is when you are trying to go into a one lane or like behind, like an alleyway of a, say a apartment complex. It's very difficult to like if you. If you can't push your snow to one direction. Like you have a curb or people's entrances of their house, or worse yet, you in a parking lot, cars are on both sides and like, it's very difficult to like choose which direction you're going to do the snow, right and trying to scoop it or get it in a certain direction especially. There's a lot of it. So this is really cool because it's easier to scoop, really push it in a spot and tile things up. And then obviously both sides move. Has the really cool lights. And don't quote me on this, but I believe this is about 7,500. And this is the smaller version. There's one that's. I think. I think it's the three before or something like that. It's another foot wider, but this is all we need it for. We do not do a lot of snow plowing. Maybe two times a year, if we're lucky in terms of snow here. And our biggest thing is the salting. So that way when the snow is sitting around, if it sits around for two or three weeks, the guys have something to do. We can go out and do salting of the commercial properties that we have. So hopefully that was educational. I know it's not. I don't do a lot of equipment videos, but hopefully that was something that you might look at. Some of the things that we really like is the v nos as well as having the agitator in the salter. This is definitely our biggest setup in terms of having the salter and the plow on the same truck is kind of nice. In the past, we've done separate salt trucks from the plow trucks. Just because we have some properties that don't need the plowing, but they want the salting. But this is kind of a cool setup. It has everything on it. This could be a two man operation, Someone in the back putting salt out and then also marking things while they are plowing. In our market, we don't plow like 40 times in a year like they do up north. So it's definitely going to be something for our guys. We like to have two guys in our truck so that one guy can kind of be watching for obstacles, vehicles, curbs, as well as watching the salter in the back. And the other operator inside the truck can just really focus on the plowing. So hopefully that was helpful. Have a great day. Take care.