There are electric cars, trucks and bikes, but until now there wasn’t a fully electric vacuum excavator in the industry. Dan Sharpe, president of Sharp Equipment, and business partner Greg Jeter changed that with the creation of their lithium-ion vacuum excavator trailer.
The all-electric Sharp EV4 trailer vac runs on a 40 kWh, 340-amp hour, 120-volt battery that Sharpe says will last a typical 8-hour work day.
The trailer unit, which is 21 feet, 6 inches long and 8 feet wide, has a 4 cubic yard debris tank and 270 gallon water tank. The only things a contractor will have to service on the unit are the water pump (CAT 4 gpm pump producing up to 3,000 psi at 2,600 rpm) and the blower (National Vacuum Equipment). It weighs 7,000 pounds.
“You have to change your whole mindset. Regardless of brand of trailer unit, when you turn that diesel motor on and it’s running all day revved up,” Sharpe says. “With the electric component, you have to change it up. Everything is direct drive.”
Sharpe says there are no pulleys, belts, tensioners or clutches for operators to worry about, nor engine oil, fuel or filters to change out.
“Our blower is the most powerful trailer vacuum on the market at 20 inches of Mercury,” Sharpe says. The blower defaults to 540 cfm, but a push button on the control panel allows operators to achieve 1,000 cfm for five minutes if needed.
“On a trailer unit, you don’t need 1,000 all day long because five minutes is going to suck up a lot of material and fill it up,” Sharpe added. “That’s part of the mindset, it doesn’t need to be running on full throttle to run it.”
The unit has a noise level below 85 dba, which allows operators to ditch the OSHA-required hearing protection.
Sharpe and Jeter started to build the prototype in July 2022 and by January 2023 they had a crew from B&H Construction in Oklahoma testing it. B&H also purchased the first production unit through Ditch Witch Oklahoma. “We are selling through several Ditch Witch dealers and several independent dealers,” Sharpe says.
The electric unit can typically be charged at a shop on a 220-volt/30-amp outlet and takes about six hours to charge. 817-889-2800; www.sharp-ev.com
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