Stump removal: grind or exacavate?Why stump grinding beats excavating almost every time

There's basically two ways to remove stumps from your yard: grind them out with a stump grinding machine, or dig them out with an excavator.

There's basically two ways to remove stumps from your yard: grind them out with a stump grinding machine, or dig them out with an excavator.
Stumpgrinding is more cost-effective, faster, and a lot less messy. To see what we mean, check out the illustration below.

As the illustration shows, a stump is much bigger than it looks. To dig it out, you have to remove the entire root ball. That takes a lot of digging, which takes a lot of time, and leaves a gaping hole in your yard.
How are you going to fill that hole? The amount of backfill you have left over won’t be enough. You’ll have to bring in dirt from somewhere else, which will cost time and/or money. On top of that, you’ll have excavator tracks all over your grass.
When it comes to stump removal, you’re choosing between two different machines. An excavator is more expensive to transport and more expensive to operate. The end product is harder to deal with, too. You’re left with a massive stump and root ball to dispose of. That’ll take a full size trailer to haul, and a full size excavator to get it out of the ground.
The alternative, of course, is this machine:

It’s relatively compact. We can get it in and out of tight spaces, and you only need one person to operate it. Instead of a gaping hole, you’ll be left with a small swath of dirt a little bigger than the visible part of the stump. You can easily plant new grass right over it.
The only waste left over will be a big pile of wood chunks. Whether you pay us to haul them, or find a use for them yourself, it takes less work to get rid of them.
The video below shows what you’re left with after a stump grinding job.

Is excavating ever better?
Only if you actually need to get the stump completely out of the ground IE you need to put utilities or some structure right where the stump is. This is a pretty unlikely scenario, since utilities can usually just be routed elsewhere.
If you’re building a structure there, well, you probably need to excavate there anyways.
The one time when excavating is better is when it’s your only option. When the ground around the stump is too rocky, it’ll put excessive wear on the grinding blade, making it too expensive for us to operate the stump grinder.
This is rare, though. For almost any job, grinding is the best removal strategy.
To learn more about how stump grinding works, and what affects the cost of a stump grinding job, you can read this post.
To get an estimate on your stump grinding or tree removal job, you can go to our estimate form here and fill one out.