ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Pullers

I want to buy a cable puller,what do you guys suggest?

That would depend on what your trying to pull.Are you pulling a 200' runs of (3)2/0 or a 1000' runs of (4)750kcmil?

If you have the money I would recomend the Ultra tugger setup The company I work for bought one and it is easy to set up and use and also very powerful.I used it on a 800'run of 500mcm 15KV cable and put 10,000 pounds on it for 35 minutes and it never slowed down

The Ultra tugger is a great machine and it should be for the cost I think about $7000. for the whole set up.

Transporting it from job to job is a chore if you do not have a lift gate truck, or fork lift.

As txsparky said what you want to do with it makes a big difference.

As a side note you can find used pullers on Ebay

If you only need it once in a while you may be able to rent a puller, some supply houses in my area rent them or larger contractor rental yards.

It can very. Sometimes it can be 200' of 3/0 or 500' of 750's. Most of it are small feeders and I am interested in the one's you attatch a hole hawg or a power head to.

Our company just had two mfg. reps. come out to our job to demonstrate both pullers that you are referring to.

They look like they would work great for pulling feeders into subpanels but the problem we had was that we were pulling 300MCM int our main gear from a pull box and there was no way to set up either machine. We ended up using the ultra tugger anyway.

One thing that the rep mentioned is that thier machine would fit into a hitch receiver in the back of a truck so that you could pull site lighting feeds. That sounded good because both machines could pull much faster than the ultra tugger.

Maybe you could setup a demonstration with a mfg. rep. on one of your jobs.

I own the Ultra Tugger. Yes it is slower than some. Yes you do need a truck with a gate or ramp to transport it. Where it excells is it's versatility. With it's snorkel like boom, we can set it up for manhole work one day, and an overhead pullbox the next. Litlle will stop it. Yes, it's expensive, but thre are firms that sell them used or reconditioned. Check the Electrical Advertiser magazine for such firms. The Ultra Tugger by Greenlee seems to have "copied" some of the best things that were in similar tuggers origianlly developed by Condux. These were originally designed for the utilities. They were much more expensive than the Greenlee. And something to consider is service, repair, and parts availability. There was green guys, purple [now yellow] guys, orange guys, powder blue guys, and red guys. Most are still around, but none seems to have thrived and made the across the board advances in design and product line as Greenlee. JMO

Coreman,
Greenlee makes an attachment that doubles the speed of the ultra tugger on lighter loads then slows it back down when heavier loads are encountered

fedup,

You know, you're right! I remember seeing it in their catalogs. Perhaps that'll be one of my next investments. Thanks for the info!