Mobile crusher hire in SEQ: wet hire vs dry hire, and what it really costs

If you have searched for mobile crusher hire in Brisbane or anywhere across South-East Queensland, you have probably noticed the quotes are hard to compare. One company offers a machine on a day rate. Another quotes weekly dry hire plus a float fee. A third talks per tonne. They are not the same product, and picking the wrong model is how a straightforward crushing job turns into an expensive lesson. Here is the difference between wet hire and dry hire, what each one really costs, and why we run our RM 70GO! 2.0 as a wet hire service billed per tonne.

Dry hire: you get a machine, and all of the risk

Dry hire means the crusher arrives on a float and the rest is your problem. You supply the operator, and with them the responsibility for production rate, screen setup, blockages, daily servicing and getting the machine home in one piece. The day or weekly rate looks clean on paper, but it is only one line of the real cost:

• An experienced crusher operator, hired or pulled off other work, for every hour the machine runs.
• Production risk: if the feed is wrong or the setup is off, you pay the same daily rate for half the tonnes.
• Downtime risk: a blocked or poorly fed crusher still costs you rent while it sits.
• Wear, damage liability and bond terms that sit with you for the whole hire.

Dry hire can make sense for crews that crush week in, week out and carry their own experienced operator. For a civil or demolition contractor who crushes a few times a year, it usually means paying to learn someone else's machine on your own program.

Wet hire: machine, operator and the production risk, handled

Wet hire means the crusher comes with the person who runs it. Our operator floats the RM 70GO! 2.0 to site, sets it up, runs the crush, clears any blockages, manages the screen setup for the product you need, and floats it out when the stockpile is done. Your excavator feeds the machine; everything else is ours. That changes what you are actually buying: not a machine by the day, but finished product on the ground.

It is also why wet hire suits per-tonne billing. The RM 70GO! 2.0 weighs everything it produces on its onboard belt scale, so the invoice is for exactly the tonnes that came off the conveyor. Most jobs land around $10 per tonne, higher-tonnage jobs can come in as low as $8 per tonne, and the price is firmed at quote. If the crush runs slow for any reason, that is our problem, not your day rate.

Comparing the two on a real job

Take a typical SEQ demolition stockpile of about 1,000 tonnes of clean concrete. On wet hire at $8 to $10 per tonne, that is $8,000 to $10,000 all-in for crushing, with the operator, setup and production risk included, and you know the number before the machine arrives. On dry hire, the same job is a weekly machine rate plus your operator's wages plus float fees, and the total depends entirely on how many tonnes per day your crew can actually push through an unfamiliar crusher. Run well, the numbers can end up close. Run badly, dry hire costs more and takes longer, and there is no way to know which you are getting until you are committed.

What you get on the day with us

The RM 70GO! 2.0 is a compact mobile impact crusher, about 24 tonnes, producing up to 140 tonnes per hour. It travels on a standard float with no oversize permits or escorts and is crushing within about 20 minutes of arriving. One operator runs it from the cabin with a radio remote as backup. The onboard magnet lifts reinforcing steel out of the crushed concrete, and the closed-loop screen grades the product in a single pass, so compactable road base, drainage gravel or 5 mm and 10 mm aggregate builds up ready to use. For oversized slabs and heavily reinforced material, our two-stage setup puts the Komplet Krokodile shredder in front of the crusher so tough feed is broken down first instead of turned away.

Questions to ask any crusher hire company

Whoever you hire, these five questions will surface the real cost of a quote fast:

• Is the operator included, and who carries the production risk if the crush runs slow?
• Am I paying by the day or by the tonne, and how are the tonnes measured?
• What float, mobilisation and permit costs sit on top of the rate?
• What happens with oversized or reinforced material: is it crushed, or left in the pile?
• Who handles servicing, blockages and screen changes during the hire?

Our answers are simple: operator included, billed per tonne on the onboard scale, transport quoted fairly by location, oversize handled by the two-stage Krokodile setup, and everything on the machine is ours to look after. Recycling King is QLD ERA licensed and fully insured, and crews across SEQ including C Civil and Fulton Hogan put their material through our machine.

Areas we cover

We provide mobile crusher hire with an operator across South-East Queensland, including Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba, and throughout New South Wales including Sydney, Western Sydney, the Central Coast and Newcastle.

To get a firm per-tonne price for crusher hire on your project, call 0401 803 662 or request a quote.