Software for the yard running vacuum trucks.

A vacuum truck is the unit a rental yard sends when a job needs material moved that nothing else can touch — wet slurry, drilling mud, tank bottoms, or the dirt over a buried line that has to come out without a strike. On a drilling location it cleans out the cellar and the mud pit; on a utility job it daylights a pipe so a crew can dig safe; on a turnaround it pulls debris out of a vessel a person should never enter. That range is exactly what makes a vac truck hard to run as a rental asset: the spoils tank fills and the truck has to leave to dump, the blower and water pump are unforgiving of operator error, and the fluids it handles are often corrosive or sour. EquipFlow runs vacuum trucks the way the yard that built it does — dispatch, billing, maintenance, and return inspection on one record per unit.

Built inside Rental King, right now.

Rental King is a heavy-equipment rental yard in Odessa and Midland, TX. They run vacuum trucks, manlifts, forklifts, light towers, generators, compressors, and water trucks on MSA contracts through the Permian Basin — 24/7, oilfield pace. EquipFlow was designed and first deployed inside that yard. Every feature was tested against their live operation before it shipped. The product runs there today.

Vacuum trucks are high-utilization units that earn well and damage expensively, and that pairing is where a yard loses money quietly. A truck staged on a pad waiting for a tank earns nothing extra if the standby hours never reach the invoice, and it loses real money if a blower is scored or a tank is returned full of slurry and the damage goes uncharged. The hour meter is the spine of both maintenance and billing, so it has to be captured the same way every time — at return, on the inspection, against the rental record. When dispatch, billing, maintenance, and inspection all read from one unit record, the dispatcher quotes the right rate and plans the dump trips, the mechanic services the blower against real hours before it self-destructs, and the bookkeeper closes the month without reconstructing what happened from a stack of tickets. That single-record discipline is what keeps a vac-truck fleet honest.

Vacuum Truck specs the rental record tracks.

Every number below is a sourced specification range. The render layer is the only path these values reach the page — they live on the unit record, not in a dispatcher's head.

Debris (spoils) tank capacity

12-15yd3

Fresh water tank capacity

1000-1500gal

Vacuum blower airflow

3500-5000cfm

Maximum vacuum (mercury)

18-30inHg

Water pump flow rate

10-25gpm

Water pump operating pressure

3000psi

Boom rotation

320deg

How EquipFlow handles vacuum trucks on the dispatch board.

A vacuum truck is not a set-and-forget yard asset on the dispatch board; it is a line on the driver-by-hour view because it has to leave the job to dump. The spoils tank fills, and when it is full the truck breaks off, drives to an approved disposal or transfer site, offloads, and comes back, so a single cleanout can be several round trips the dispatcher has to see coming. The board shows which trucks are on location, which are loaded and headed to disposal, and which are due back, on the same responsive screen at any hour. The trap here is the disposal arrangement and the operator: a vac truck sent to a job without a confirmed dump site, or without the wet-vac versus dry-vac configuration the customer expected, is a wasted dispatch. The dispatcher confirms both on the rental record before the truck rolls. Because the same class is over-promised easily during overlapping turnarounds, the board flags the conflict at assignment, not at the gate.

Billing vacuum trucks — MSA, standby, and site-level tax.

Vacuum-truck work in the oilfield runs almost entirely on MSA terms, so the rate override lives on the customer record per equipment class rather than in a sheet the dispatcher keeps current. A vac-truck rental created for that account picks up the negotiated day or hour rate on its own. These units sit idle billable more than most: a truck staged on a frac pad waiting for a tank to be ready, or held overnight for a morning cleanout, is on standby, and standby is billed at a rate separate from active hours so the invoice carries both lines without a month-end rebuild. Disposal tickets, fresh-water fills, and an operator if one is supplied ride the same invoice as add-on lines. Tax jurisdiction is set on the delivery-site record, so a truck that worked across more than one county still gets the right rate per site. Invoices post to QuickBooks Online on close.

Maintenance on vacuum trucks.

Vacuum-truck PM is hour-meter driven, not calendar driven, because a truck running back-to-back hydro-excavation jobs burns an interval in a matter of weeks while a yard spare can sit a whole season. The hour reading posts when the return inspection records it, and the maintenance module advances the PM clock off that reading so the next service lands on real usage. The blower is the heart of the machine and the most expensive thing to lose, so PM leans hard on blower oil, the relief valve, and the air filtration that keeps grit out of the rotary lobes, alongside the chassis engine and the high-pressure water pump. The vacuum-relief and primary-shutoff floats get checked too, because a flooded blower is a teardown. Work orders, parts, and meter history live on the unit record, which is also where a damage charge written up at return inspection turns into a repair ticket.

Vacuum Truck return inspections.

Two inspection rhythms apply. The operator-facing daily check before each shift is the customer's responsibility while the truck is on rent, and it is where most catches happen on a working vac truck. The yard's own control is the return inspection: before a truck comes off rent, the driver runs a mobile-web checklist on a phone with no app install, captures the hour-meter reading, and attaches required photos that cannot be skipped. Vacuum-specific checks belong here that no generic checklist would catch: the spoils tank actually emptied and rinsed, the vacuum and pressure relief valves seat, the boom and suction-hose condition, the water pump and reel, and any sign the blower ingested liquid or debris. A truck returned with a half-load of corrosive slurry still in the tank is both a safety problem and a damage event, so the photos and timestamp tie to the rental record before the truck leaves the customer site.

Common vacuum truck classes in the field.

The product, the same way it runs for vacuum trucks.

The sections below are the EquipFlow modules that matter most when running vacuum trucks — each links to the full feature detail.

Operator guides for running vacuum trucks.

Field-tested playbooks that go deeper on pricing, dispatch, billing, and maintenance for fleets like this.

• DOT Compliance for Equipment Hauling →
• How to Schedule Equipment Deliveries →
• Minimum Rental Periods and Why They Matter →
• Adding a New Equipment Category to Your Yard →

What you give up running vacuum trucks in EquipFlow.

EquipFlow is a web app, so the return inspection needs a signal to load. On a remote lease with no coverage, the driver cannot finish the mobile inspection at the customer site; most yards run it at the yard on return instead, which means the photos and hour reading land later than ideal. There is no built-in telematics integration today, so engine hours and fault codes from a manufacturer portal are not pulled automatically — the hour meter is captured at return inspection. EquipFlow also does not track disposal-manifest compliance or hazardous-waste paperwork; it bills the disposal line and leaves the regulatory record to your existing process. A yard with an unusual billing or compliance structure should bring it to the demo to be scoped honestly.