Belt vs floor

What are you hauling?

 

A walking floor for light and fluffy materials, lot of guys around here used to haul a lot of ground hay in walking floors.

Belt trailer for heavier stuff. Wet distillers is a big one around here

 

Live floors are used a ton up here in SW Washington and Nw Oregon for wood chips and hog fuel. They seem to work well.

 

Never ran a belt, but sure seems like you'd have better control over partial unloads compared to the irregular sloughing out the back of a live floor.

 

Belt is a lot faster and easier, obviously you don’t want to be hauling debris or anything chunky with it, walking floor still seems to have the bigger market though, ran a push out trailer too which was the biggest pain in the ### out of all of them

 

We ran a couple of 48ft click-floor trailers for hauling dry wood chips and hog-fuel. They did great for us and they were money makers. The lumber mill we were contracted to closed down and we had to look for other hauls.
We hauled mostly dried bulk loads... dried beans, rice bran, rice hulls, ammonium sulphate, bulk prunes, rock salt, fly ash and cull apples. No gravel and no sand, ever.
If the load was wet, no matter what the load was, we had trouble unloading it. Plus, a wet load will level itself off and if you're overweight on an axle you're screwed. You could move a dry load a little with the click floor. I don't know if you could move a load forward with a belt trailer
When we were hauling the saw dust we ran head to head with a couple of belt trailers from another company. They got unloaded faster than our walking floors but we could haul more legally. We had rollover tarps, the belt trailers used okie tarps and it took them longer to tarp and get going.
On a five day week, averaging three loads a day with a strict cut-off time at the destination, we usually hauled fifteen loads. The belt trailers were getting twelve to fourteen.

 

Check out Weaver Systems out of Gap, PA. They have a trailer that is kinda the best of both worlds. Full width belt, total,unload time 60 seconds or less. I have an uncle with 2 of them and he loves them. Just don’t pull them with the tarp open or it pulls the belt up on top of the little flanges at the bottom

 

I looked at their site. Very impressive. Especially that 60 second unload time. Could you take it a little easier on the machine and unload in 120 seconds instead.
Are there any videos showing it unloading?

 

I have been running belts exclusively for last 3 years and about 400,000 miles; running agriculture commodities around Utah, Idaho and Nevada. We use a 53' 4 axle 108 cubic yards Western Trailers set up. Average loads are 31-35 tons. Primarily Mill Run (31-35 ton), Gypsum Fines and many others dry commodities from DDGs to Beet shreds and a couple times each month we haul magnesium oxide or minad dolomite. We have also hauled a lot of fertilizer, compost and landscaping barks, in addition to peet moss. The peet mose is usually moist enough (and cold or moist gypsum fines) to require some shovel work to get some off the side walls especially when winter temps. I haven't used a walking floor but have been unloading in same dairies as some at the same time..... The belt is much much faster. I can empty a full 35 ton load through main swing door in about 10 min. The slide gate takes longer but mostly due to the speed limits of the augers at the mills I'm unloading at. Slide gate is also a very dusty unload vs hoppers. But I've never had any problems and love the ease of unloading. I'll try to upload a few pics soon.