Don’t use a wheelbarrow or your kids, use Equipter’s RB4000
Many roofers grow up around the business and follow their father’s or grandfather’s footsteps into the trade. And US Builders Reviews is always hearing from roofers like that, with stories of scrambling around jobsites, picking up the shingles and nails tossed off of roofs when they’re young.
Leave it to roofers like that, roofers with a lifetime of schlepping shingles and searching for nails, to come up with a better system. That’s just what the Beiler family did when they created the Equipter RB4000.
Equipter RB4000 is a roofing trailer that can be raised up to 12-feet, so crews can easily slide old shingles into the four-cubic-yard container—no more tossing shingles to the ground. If you’re the son or daughter of a roofer, sorry, no more reward for those tins of nails.
RB4000 has a 13-horsepower Honda engine, which makes it self-driving. Once it’s full of shingles, crews can easily drive it to a dumpster and then use its hydraulic power to dump its contents—no more wheelbarrow trips or heavy lifting.
This video shows it in action
For roofers, Equipter says the RB4000 can decrease cleanup time by 80 percent and increase overall production by 25 to 50 percent. For homeowners, it can translate to tidier yards during construction, and it means their landscaping won’t have thousands of pounds of shingles dumped onto it.
Turns out, saving your kids a strained back is good motivation
Aaron Beiler, who started his own roofing business in 1987, came up with the idea as a way to make roofing easier and more efficient for his four sons. Beiler thought they might join him in the trade when they were old enough and wanted to spare them some of the physical labor that earns roofing its reputation as a backbreaking trade.
In fact, US Builders Review wrote about his company in 2016.
Today there are more than a thousand RB4000s in-use across the country. In fact, they’re in nearly every state in the U.S.
Beiler brainstormed and came up with an early prototype of RB4000. He and his sons started using it on their own projects and immediately saw an uptick in productivity. Within about a year, Beiler, his four sons and two sons-in-law launched Equipter. They built a manufacturing facility in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and went into full production in 2005.
“In a year or two, we went from a roofing company, and that’s what we thought our future looked like, into expanding our vision into, hey let’s start building this piece of equipment and making it available to other contractors as well,” says Sam Beiler, one of Aaron’s son’s and the company’s marketing director.
Today there are more than a thousand RB4000s in-use across the country. In fact, they’re in nearly every state in the U.S.
Made in Pennsylvania
US Builders Review often learns about innovative product; many are made far from home.
The Beiler family says it takes pride in making a quality product and keeping production local. In 2016, it expanded into a new manufacturing facility—still in Lancaster—that’s six times the size of their original facility, and company sources American-made components whenever possible.
That quality does drive the cost up, but thanks to the productivity boost RB4000 offers, most roofers see a return-on-investment after just one year, the company says.
“Even for us, being a roofing contractor, to get the first one built, we looked at the cost and were like, man how are we going to be able to do this?” Beiler says.
It took a little while for Equipter to gain a footing in the market. Equipter didn’t wasn’t a longstanding manufacturer, and the RB4000 was a new concept.
But that’s not the end of the story. The RB4000’s popularity has snowballed, and the company has added a handful of other products. In January it launched its latest—one that US Builders Review will discuss in detail in another blog post. To see that post when it’s available, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
