I've been buying Butlers for 21 years. The dependability and ease of maintenance has won me over. Now with hi-heat the system is awesome. The only improvement I would make is offering a #5 blower although the suction is very good.
I am on my 4th butler as of september.I only keep mine 4 years and trade on a new one. In 13 years i have had 4 down days because of mechanical failures. 6 down days because of chevy failures. I only live 2.5 hours from butler, which helps. On my trade ins,I have gotten the percentage they advertise every time.
Mine is currently a 99 with about 5500 hours on it. The heat isn't as good as the new issue units, however, the carpets get cleaned, dry fairly quickly, and thus far no issues whatsoever . I love the stainless tanks. I do wish the unit could be mounted so as to get more usable space in the van.
The Butler layout does use up a lot of van space however, with all that room for the components it sure is easy to maintain and repair when you need to. My biggest complaint about the several slide-ins I had was the nightmare of working on those knuckle busters with all the components cramped into such a tight space. It's a trade-off I'm very willing to make.
At first glance, the Butler in a box is attractive. It's not until you sit there looking at the bottom line number that you realize the terrible truth.
You're paying a pretty penny for a very nice box truck...
Its only a waste of space if you don't use the room. Its a great multi function truck for us.
Its always ready for a water loss, with all the shelving we can do a decent size water job out of it and still carry out carpet cleaning equipment at all times. When we have a large commercial job we also can throw on several Cimex's and have the ability to HWE & Encap. With the large fresh and waste tanks you can cut through quite a bit of acreage before you need to consider filling or dumping.