GPS Fleet Tracking for Hydrovac & Vacuum Excavation

A hydrovac site ticket says the truck arrived at 7:30 and left at 3:15, and the customer's project manager remembers it differently. With a geofence around the site, the GPS tracking device records the truck crossing in and out on its own, with the time to the minute and the position on the map. The site report lists every truck on that job that day, the arrival, the departure and the time inside the zone. High Point GPS sets the geofences from the job list, or the dispatcher draws one when a locate request comes in, and the record starts building the moment the truck rolls through the gate.

That record travels with the invoice. When a customer questions four hours of pump time on a two-hour locate, the office pulls the trip replay. It shows the truck inside the zone from 7:31 to 11:48, the vacuum pump running for three hours and fifty minutes of it, and one trip to the water fill and back. Most disputes end there. The same reports feed job costing, because a site that took eleven truck-hours to daylight three crossings is either a hard site or a slow crew, and the timeline shows which. Contracts that bill travel time get the trip from the previous site or the yard, with its duration and distance.

The billable part of a hydrovac truck is not the odometer. It is the vacuum blower, the water pump, the boiler in winter and the PTO that drives them. An IOX-AUXM module on the GPS tracking device reads each of those circuits as on or off, and the High Point GPS platform turns the transitions into a log: PTO engaged at 8:02, vacuum on at 8:04, off at 9:37, on again at 10:10. Hours per component accumulate per truck and per site. A dispatcher sees which trucks are digging and which are waiting on a locate, without a radio call, and a supervisor sees when a pump ran for an hour on a site with no debris hauled.

The shop gets the numbers it has been guessing at. Blower service, boiler inspection, water pump seals and hydraulic fluid changes are scheduled on the hours those components actually ran, with reminders in the High Point GPS platform and fault codes from the engine arriving as they are logged. A truck that shows high engine hours and low pump hours is idling on sites; one with high pump hours and a service interval based on mileage is overdue without anyone knowing. High Point GPS wires the inputs during installation, labels each one and builds the reports around the way the fleet bills, whether that is by the hour, by the hole or by the day.

Every hydrovac day includes trips that are not digging: the run to a licensed disposal facility with a full debris tank and the trip to a hydrant or fill station for water. Geofences around each facility record the arrival, the time on site and the departure, and the trip replay shows the route between. When a customer is billed for disposal, the invoice cites the facility and the time, and the record matches the manifest the facility issued. When an operator reports a forty-minute wait at the dump, the dwell time confirms it. Trips are stored on the device when coverage drops and uploaded when it returns, which matters on rural pipeline rights-of-way.

Winter changes the arithmetic. The boiler runs to heat water for frozen ground and to keep the tank from freezing between sites, and that fuel and those hours are easy to lose in the day's total. A boiler input on the IOX-AUXM separates heating time from excavation time, so the fleet knows what winter actually costs per truck and can price cold-weather work accordingly. Fuel-card integration matches each fill-up to the truck and the day, and the fuel report compares consumption against pump and boiler hours instead of kilometres alone. A truck burning far more than its hours explain is a truck with a problem worth a look.

A loaded hydrovac unit is a heavy truck by any definition, and in most fleets it falls under the ELD mandate in both Canada and the United States, along with hours-of-service limits and weight rules that vary by jurisdiction and season. The driver app on a tablet in the cab keeps the operator's hours, with the ruleset set to match where the truck works, and the electronic DVIR walks the pre-trip through a hydrovac-specific checklist: boom, hose, tank doors, boiler, lights. A defect goes to the shop before the truck leaves the yard. High Point GPS installs the rugged GPS tracking device where the cab sees mud, water and vibration all day.

The sites themselves are the other hazard. A hydrovac truck backing into a lane closure downtown, with a boom swinging over a sidewalk, is where the fleet's largest claims come from. AI dash cams facing the road and the operator record the approach, the backing and the setup, and an event such as hard braking or a collision saves the clip automatically. When a pedestrian or a parked car is involved, the clip and the trip replay are in the office before the police report is written. Driver scoring set for heavy trucks, with speeding thresholds by zone, gives supervisors a specific trip to coach from rather than a general reminder.