Vibe Plate & Jumping Jack Tips

Updated · 2026-07-26

How to use the two small compaction machines you'll see on site: the vibe plate and the jumping jack.

Types and how to tell them apart

The small walk-behind compactors you push around on site come in two main types. A Vibe plate (plate compactor🔒) has a flat vibrating plate that pounds the ground flat, while a jumping jack🔒 (rammer🔒) has a narrow foot that bounces up and down, stamping the ground down. Both are also called a wacker packer.

💡 Why?

Compaction is all about squeezing the air out of the soil to make it denser. If you backfill without compacting, the air pockets work their way out over time, the soil settles, the ground sinks, and any buried pipes or structures built on top start to sag. To get the air out properly, don't backfill a big load in one go — fill in layers of about 100–150mm and compact each layer. If a layer is too thick, the vibration can't reach the bottom and only the surface gets compacted.

Where big machines can't fit

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