People often use hiring a DIY stump grinder as a way to reduce the cost of removing trees, but unfortunately hiring a DIY stump grinder usually works out to be more expensive.
Doing DIY at home gives a great feeling of accomplishment and saving money is always a good feeling too, so why not hire a stump grinder and avoid paying an arborist to remove the stumps by doing it yourself?
Hiring a stump grinder is definitely cheaper by the hour than paying an arborist to grind tree stumps. Unfortunately if you hire a stump grinder, it will be a much smaller machine than a professional stump grinder used by an arborist. As it’s a hired out machine, it will not be looked after and the blades will likely be blunt by people not using it correctly.
Because of this, it will typically take 4 times longer to grind stumps yourself, so you will have to pay more to hire the stump grinder from the hire shop. Also, because it’s a smaller machine, it will struggle to deal with large tree stumps and is unlikely to be able to go as deep into the roots of the tree stump. This means that you will probably end up hiring an arborist to grind the stumps anyway or face the risk of the tree growing back.
Finally, because the arborists machine is more powerful than the type hired out by hire shops, the finished job will look much neater, and you will save some money.