Sumpline Hydro Excavation · Welshpool
Sumpline Hydro Excavation. Non-destructive digging across the Perth metro— we cut with water so we don’t cut your cable.
Potholing to prove services before a bore goes in. Trench work through a live corridor. Pits nobody has opened in years. Pier holes where an excavator can’t swing. Price the hours, the tank loads and the traffic plan on the Dig before you ring.
Digging the metro since 2016 $20M public liability Slurry to a licensed facility
$2,528
5.5 H · 7258 L · 2 LOADS
Service potholing — 8 holes to 1.8 m through clay, on a suburban street, day shift.
The Dig
Cut the section, watch the tank fill. The tank is what sends the truck away and back.
Spoil docket · estimate
$2,528
5.5 hours in clay, 8 holes to 1.8 m — 7,258 L of slurry, 2 tank loads
- 4-hour minimum on the truck
- your DBYD plans are free — we don’t bill for them
- unmapped ground changes the hours, not the rate
What we’re doing changes the drawing, the spoil per hole and the plant that comes with it
What we’re cutting the ground sets how fast the water cuts — nothing else
How many 600 × 600 potholes, on even centres
How deep 0.6 m to 3.0 m, in 200 mm steps
Where the truck sits added once — it isn’t inside the four-hour minimum
When we’re on site a rate swap, not a multiplier — the half-hour grid doesn’t change
Every figure on this page is computed from the rates below — no hidden loading.
Who you’re dealing with
- Est. 2016 · ABN 00 000 000 387Ten years of Perth ground, out of a Welshpool yard.
- Liquid-waste transport licence LW0000Slurry to a licensed facility, dockets attached to your invoice.
- $20M public liability · $10M plantCrews inducted and white-carded before they set foot on site.
- Locating to AS 5488 on requestQuality level B before we start, when the job actually wants it.
Every hole is photographed and dimensioned before it’s backfilled — the pack lands with the invoice, not three weeks later.
What it costs
One truck rate, one disposal rate, and the plant the job actually needs.
The truck is $296 an hour with two crew, billed in half hours with a four-hour minimum. Everything else on this list is a flat line you can see coming. Prices include GST.
Service potholing
600 × 600 windows down onto power, gas, comms or water so the designer can put a real level on the drawing before the rig starts.
from $1,424one hole, 0.6 m, sand, open site
Trench excavation
A 400 mm slot cut in 1.5 m segments through a live services corridor, with shoring boards and edge protection on the truck.
from $1,604includes $180 plant & consumables
Pit, sump & GPT cleaning
Stormwater pits, sumps and gross-pollutant traps sucked out and washed down, with confined-space gear, a gas monitor and a standby hand.
from $1,684includes $260 plant & consumables
Pier & post holes
500 × 500 shafts beside a service or a boundary where an auger would be a gamble and an excavator can’t swing.
from $1,424same floor as potholing
After-hours & shutdowns
Nights, weekends and plant shutdowns, when the corridor is only yours between 10pm and 5am.
$376 an hourrate swap, same half-hour grid
Traffic plan, suburban street
One accredited traffic controller, signage and the plan for the day, so the truck can sit on the road legally.
$420flat, added once
Slurry to a licensed facility
The water you cut with comes back into the tank. Every 6,000 L load is tipped at a licensed liquid-waste facility and docketed.
$240 a load6,000 L, actual volume
Locating & marking
Electromagnetic locating and marking to AS 5488 quality level B before the first hole, where the corridor is busy enough to want it.
Half-day, quotedseparate from the dig
Locating and marking to AS 5488 quality level B before we start is a separate half-day — some jobs want it, most don’t, and we’ll say which yours is.
On the tools
What people say when the hole is open and nothing is broken.
“Four services to prove before the HDD rig landed and the plans had two of them in the wrong easement. Sumpline had all four exposed and dimensioned in a day and a half — we moved the bore 900 mm and never touched a cable.”
Site engineer, civil contractorKwinana bore crossing
“The sewer junction was somewhere under a 1970s driveway the owner wasn’t keen on losing. Two potholes, both dry, junction found on the second. Cheaper than the concrete would have been.”
Licensed plumberMaylands
“Nine years since anyone opened that stormwater pit. They quoted the loads honestly up front, hit three, and the dockets came through with the invoice. No argument at the end.”
Facilities managerMalaga warehouse estate
These are demonstration testimonials written for this page. They are not real customers and are not marked up as review data.
Where we work
The yard is at Welshpool. The truck runs the whole metro.
Freeway both ways, so a Joondalup morning and a Rockingham afternoon is a normal day. Bunbury and the Peel region by arrangement — we’ll tell you honestly whether the travel makes sense for your job.
Regular ground
- Perth CBD
- Welshpool & Kewdale
- Malaga
- Maylands
- Ellenbrook
- Joondalup
- Fremantle
- Kwinana
- Rockingham
- Canning Vale
Bunbury and the Peel region by arrangement. Outside the metro we’ll price the travel separately and tell you if a local operator is the better call — a four-hour minimum plus two hours of freeway is not a favour to anyone.
Get a price
Send the scope through and we’ll come back with the hours.
If you’ve run the Dig above, hit “Send this scope through” and the numbers land in the box for you.
Asked every week
Six questions we get before the truck is booked.
Why water and not an excavator?
Because a bucket doesn’t know what it’s hit until it’s hit it. A 3,000 psi water jet cuts soil and stops dead at a PE gas main, a fibre bundle or a 150 DICL water main — the material is simply too tough for the pressure we run. The vacuum lifts the spoil straight into the tank, so the hole stays clean, the service stays intact, and the reinstatement is a bucket of clean fill rather than a claim.
The trade-off is honest: we are slower than an excavator in open ground, and we cost more per cubic metre. Where there is nothing to hit, hire an excavator. Where there is, this is the cheap option.
How does Before You Dig work, and who lodges it?
Before You Dig Australia plans are free and they’re yours, not ours. We won’t put a line item on a form you can fill in yourself in ten minutes — we do the potholing, you hold the plans.
Lodge it online for the address, and the asset owners send their plans back — usually inside two business days, longer for a Western Power or ATCO response. Bring them to site. Plans tell you a service is roughly there; potholing tells you exactly where it is and how deep. The two are not the same thing, which is the entire reason we exist.
What do the tank loads actually mean?
The water we cut with comes back into the tank with the spoil, so the tank fills faster than the hole empties — roughly 1.4 litres of slurry for every litre of ground removed. The truck carries 6,000 litres. When it’s full, it stops digging and drives to a licensed liquid-waste facility, tips, and comes back.
That’s $240 a load and it’s the number most people don’t see coming, so the Dig above draws the tank filling and stacks a second, third or fourth beside it. If a job needs four loads, you’ll know that before we quote it, not on the invoice.
What if the ground isn’t what we told you?
This assumes the ground you’ve told us about. If we hit a slab, a rock shelf or a service nobody mapped, the hours change on the day — the rate doesn’t, and you’ll see it before it happens.
In practice the supervisor rings you from the hole, tells you what’s there and what it means for the hours, and you decide. We don’t keep cutting and hand you a surprise. Limestone caprock is the usual culprit: past about 1.8 m the water has stopped cutting and you’re paying us to make noise — that’s a rock saw or a rig, and we’d rather tell you than bill you for it.
Can you work in a road reserve or a Main Roads corridor?
Yes, but not on a fixed price from a web page. A Main Roads corridor needs a traffic management plan we don’t write and a permit we don’t hold — we price that with the TMA once we’ve seen the corridor.
A normal suburban street is different and it’s a flat $420: one accredited traffic controller, signage and the plan for the day, under the WA Main Roads traffic-management framework. On private property or an open site there’s nothing to add.
Do you do after-hours and shutdown work?
Most weeks. Nights, weekends and plant shutdowns run at $376 an hour instead of $296 — a rate swap, not a multiplier, so the half-hour billing grid and the four-hour minimum are exactly the same.
Four-hour minimum on the truck — it takes the best part of an hour to set up and an hour to wash out, and we’re not billing you for a half-day we didn’t earn.
This is a demonstration build by Sapience Analytics. Want one pointed at your customers?
Sumpline isn’t a real business — the page is. Every figure on it is computed live from a pricing model we wrote down first, which is exactly how we’d build yours: your rates, your minimums, your ground, and a quote tool your customers actually finish.