The original model went on a diet: behold Equipter’s RB2000

Roofers, imagine you’ve just pried old shingles off a roof and tossed them to the yard below. You scoop them all onto a tarp, but when you go to drag the tarp to your dumpster, you remember the backyard is fenced in, and you’ll have to squeeze the tarp, and the thousand pounds of shingles it now holds, through a three-foot gate.

With RB2000—the latest product from Equipter—you won’t have to worry about that.

It’s a 2’11”-wide, self-driving construction trailer from Equipter—the Pennsylvania-based company that created a similar but larger product, RB4000—read more about that here.

This winter, Equipter released the RB2000 in hopes of offering a product that will go where the RB4000 could not: tight spaces.

Equipter sees RB2000 as a tool for residential roofers working in restricted areas; commercial roofers, who might bring it onto flat roofs; and other construction trades, who might use RB2000 for, say, interior renovations.

This video shows it in action.

Making it easier to work around fences and landscaping

Equipter built its first RB4000 in 2005, and the company has sold more than 1,000 to roofers across the country. On typical residential roofing jobs, RB4000 is perfect. Roofers can drive the 6-foot-wide trailer to the edge of a roof, raise it up to 12-feet-high, slide old shingles into the container and use RB4000’s hydraulics to empty the trailer into a dumpster.

Eighty to 90 percent of the time, roofers are able to maneuver the RB4000 around a property with ease, but the other 10 to 20 percent of the time, they run into trouble.

“Say you’re replacing a roof and it’s a property that has a pool and a fenced-in backyard with maybe just a three-foot gate into that fence,” says Sam Beiler, Equipter’s marketing director. “How are you going to get something back there? The RB4000’s just a little too big, so that’s where something like this will come in.”

It’s also about half the price of the original.

A niche product for niche problems

Like the RB4000, the RB2000 is self-driving, and its hydraulics lift it up to seven-feet-high in order to empty its contents into dumpsters.

But the company says it isn’t simply half of an RB4000, and it’s not intended to replace the RB4000. Instead, Beiler says, the RB2000 is meant to serve other niches.

“We see this as a problem solver in commercial roofing,” Beiler says. “Say you have large commercial roof, a flat roof, well you can actually take this unit and place it on the roof and have a piece of equipment you can operate on the roof. It’s light enough for that.”

RB2000 has the flexibility to be used in other industries, like interior remodeling, he says. There, a contractor could drive the RB2000 into a building, fill it with scraps and drive it out to the dumpster—an upgrade from manually lifting and steering wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow.

Like the RB4000, RB2000 is assembled in Pennsylvania with as many U.S.-made parts as Equipter can source. And, because Equipter sells its products directly, if customers have questions, they can speak with the company; they don’t have to go through a third-party sales team.

That customer feedback loop is what prompted Equipter to develop RB2000 in the first place.

“It’s a very unique product,” Beiler says. “It’s not like we were just trying to spin off of another product necessarily, or look at other products on the market and try to compete with other types of equipment, but we were looking to say, ‘Hey, let’s look at a problem we see contractors face… and find a solution for that problem.”