When your equipment needs service in the bush, you might be driving 100 kilometers just to use your satellite phone. Our job is to do as much for you remotely, and we often need precise information to move as quickly as possible. You want to be able to answer a technician’s question without driving back to the equipment. Because satellite phone connections are usually very brief, what you tell us in the first minute is critical because that lets us get started until the next time we can connect.

We often see an operator describing how the equipment is behaving and saying they got a notification that it's an L01 or an L02. This notification indicates the severity level, not an error code, and that's usually insufficient for us to diagnose the problem. In that case, the only way to get the error code would be to return to the machine.

Some work in Canada's bush involves frequently travelling the equipment from one point to another. In pipeline work, for example, you might have excavators travelling a good bit of distance. This tends to put a lot of stress on final drives. For example, they get water in them, or they heat up from travelling.

Komatsu recommends changing that final drive oil every 2000 hours. But if you're walking your machine a lot and, perhaps, walking it through water, we recommend changing the oil every 500 hours. That way, you know exactly what’s going on in your final drive, and the way I see it is, oil changes can act as cheap insurance.