With support and expertise from Porter Hire, Plumb Commercial is meeting strict deadlines on a residential housing project near Toowoomba
“All the boys love them. It’s pretty hard to even keep the plumbers out of them to do their jobs – they’d rather sit in the machines because they’re air conditioned and have stereos in them!”
Plumb Commercial director Steve Wilkes laughs down the phone when describing how his operators have taken to the Hyundai excavators he currently has at a subdivision site near Toowoomba in Queensland.
Four 32-tonne R320LC-9s, a Hyundai HL757TM-9 wheel loader and a 20-tonne Ammann ARS200 padfoot roller from Porter Hire are currently on site laying services, operated by a team that includes Trevor Jennings – aka ‘Australia’s Best Operator’ – who’s known for his Instagram and TikTok film clips of him operating heavy machinery.
“He loves being in the big stuff,” Wilkes says.
“But we try to get all of our guys to look after the machines – you’ve got to treat them like your own.”
Wilkes’s career began with an apprenticeship at his father’s sheet metal company in Toowoomba, before a move to Brisbane and into plumbing. After a decade, Toowoomba called him back and he was headhunted by Hutchinson Builders, where he spent 15 years running its hydraulic and civil division alongside his current Plumb Commercial partner Andrew.
“We decided to go out and do it for ourselves, so myself and Andrew started Plumb Commercial about three years ago,” Wilkes says.
“When we were doing subdivisions for Hutchinson Builders, Porter Hire came and saw us, and we’ve dealing with them ever since.”
Now, Plumb Commercial has seven subcontractors under its umbrella as well as the Cavalier Homes business bought around 18 months ago.
“We specialise in civil plumbing, but we also cover commercial and residential hydraulics as well, so basically anything with plumbing we can do,” Wilkes says.
“On the Cavalier Homes side, we build residential homes, along with anything up to three storeys high.
“With the plumbing contracts we’ve got two jobs that are about two and a half million dollars, but we’ve worked up to $5 to $10 million jobs.
“We’re probably not always the cheapest, but the quality of our work and the work ethic that we instil in our guys is what sets us apart from everyone else. We make sure that we that everything we do is good quality and we really don’t want to go back to a job, so we make sure that works are done right the first time.”
Highfields subdivision
The project we are looking at today is what will become a new housing estate in the expanding town of Highfields, located 20 minutes north of Toowoomba.
“We’re putting in the civil infrastructure, so the sewers, the stormwater, water, connecting it up to the council mains, and so on,” Wilkes says.
“It’s a 160-lot subdivision, with a detention basin that runs over to a creek at the back.”
On the site, the four Hyundai R320LC-9s are digging the pipe trenches that vary between three and six and a half metres in depth.
“We have them digging the trenches and backfilling, but we’ve also got to use shoring boxes on some of the deeper stuff, so they’re lifting the shoring boxes in and out as well as the piping.” Wilkes says.
The R320LC-9s were chosen specifically for “that extra reach and the extra grunt” with the deeper trenches. Wilkes says the features such as auto boom and auto power boost are useful features for making operation easier and improving productivity.
The surround-view camera system is also a major benefit on a busy worksite.
“The cameras are great for safety as we’ve probably got eight or nine guys running around on the site, and there’s a fair bit of pressure to get the work done quickly. So, having that that 360-degree camera means that, if somebody walks up behind a machine, the operator can see them and stop what they’re doing. It’s very handy for this site as well, to prevent machines from ending up in trenches.
“If we start getting into more of the subdivision work, we’ll start talking to Porter Hire about GPS as well. This will make the machines more efficient again because then we don’t need to have people in the trenches giving heights, as they can just dig straight off the machine.”
Alongside the excavators, a Hyundai HL757TM-9 wheel loader is moving material around on site – from soil dug from trenches to heavy concrete piping.
“Because we are digging so deep, we’ve got a lot of spoil that we have to move as well as backfilling,” Wilkes says.
“It was a no-brainer to get this machine in. Its capacity makes the process faster, as its bucket can hold a lot more material and therefore backfill a bit quicker than the excavators.
“We’ve also put some forks on it to move pipes around. At the moment, as it can take six months to get concrete pipe in, most developers are buying the pipe before the subdivision’s even approved and just storing it on site. It then becomes an issue when we get to site, especially when you’re covering hectares of ground, to try and move all this pipe around, so that’s where the loader comes in.
“It’s got a wide wheelbase as well, which is what we need, especially with the undulations that we’ve got on site. Especially if you’ve got new guys coming in and trying to learn how to operate them, it’s a lot safer having a wide base.”
Porter Hire
With high praise for the machines comes even higher praise for Porter Hire.
For Plumb Commercial, hiring specific machines in for different jobs makes a lot more sense rather than having a large yard to store a fleet, and the machines’ maintenance is handled for them.
“Porter Hire delivers the machines to site, they remove them from site and they look after the fleet – the only thing we’ve got to do is operate them and put fuel in,” Wilkes says.
“We have a great relationship. They’ll ring me up just to see how things are going, even if I don’t have anything on hire with them at the moment. When they’re in town, they’ll pop in and just say hello to us and see what’s coming up.”
The Porter Hire team has also been on hand to help the Plumb team out where needed.
“For example, on another one of our jobs, the people we’re doing the work for own the machine, but we needed a rock breaker. Usually that isn’t supplied without a machine, but they look after us. It’s a really healthy and prospering relationship,” he says.
“The service they give us is outstanding. If a machine breaks down or we have an issue with it, usually they’re there the next day having it fixed or replacing the machine so we can keep moving as we’re on tight deadlines.
“To anybody reading this, I just highly recommend getting in touch with them and their pricing is really competitive.
“Also, if you have downtime due to the weather or other reasons, they’re always happy to help you out and stand a machine down if they can. I wouldn’t go anywhere else – they’re our number one supplier.”
For more details on equipment available for hire through Porter Hire, visit www.porterce.com.au