It was a few minutes before 7:00 on a Tuesday morning in late October when the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it, but the caller ID showed our lead operator’s name.
“The 925E is acting up,” he said. “It starts, it idles, it sounds fine. But when I get the bucket in the ground, it loses power. Like it’s starving for fuel.”
This is not normally my department. I’m the office administrator for a 45-person construction company. Our main work is site development and excavation, but the owner also manages a few rental properties on the side. I handle the purchasing for all of it. In the previous month alone, I’d bought an ab roller for the breakroom gym and approved a replacement pool pump for one of those rental properties. Excavator fuel systems were not in my job description. But when a machine goes down and the project schedule depends on it, everyone’s job description changes.
The machine that was causing the trouble was our LiuGong 925E excavator. We took delivery in July 2024, and it had just over 400 hours when the trouble started.
Back in the spring, when we began looking for a 25-ton excavator, I sat in on most of the dealer meetings. My job was to keep the cost comparison honest: purchase price, projected maintenance, fuel use, expected resale value, the whole package. We looked at several proposals. On paper, the machines were close. The LiuGong 925E excavator wasn’t the cheapest quote, and none of our operators had run one before. But the conversation with our LiuGong equipment dealer was different.
They didn’t just quote a price. They asked about our soil conditions and how many hours we run per season. They showed us their parts stock at the regional branch and walked through their mobile service setup. They talked about uptime monitoring from the start. That told me they planned to support the machine after the sale, not just hand over the keys. So we signed. The machine showed up in July, dug hard through the rest of the summer, and our operator had no complaints. Of course, that meant I stopped thinking about it. That’s usually when a machine finds a way to remind you it exists.
The first clue actually showed up a few mornings before the phone call. On cold starts, the 925E took a bit longer to fire than it had when it was new. Our operator shrugged it off. I did, too. Then came the power loss under load.
I did what any office administrator would do. I typed how to know if fuel pump is bad into a search box while I waited for our filter order to go through. Most of the results were about gas-powered pickup trucks, not diesel excavators. Still, the basic warning signs lined up:
We changed the fuel filters that afternoon. The fuel/water separator looked clean, with no water or sediment that we could see. We started the machine, ran it around the yard for twenty minutes, and it felt fine. For about that long, I thought we had solved it. Then the operator put the bucket into a hard pile and the same loss of power came back.
Now came the decision that cost us more time than money.
I could call our LiuGong equipment dealer, whose mobile tech was about four days out. Or I could call the independent diesel mechanic we’ve used for smaller repairs. He was available in two days. To be fair, he’s a good mechanic, and I don’t want to blame him for what happened. He checked the fuel pressure at the filter housing, inspected the lines, and looked at the injector return flow. At idle and low rpm, everything read within range. But under load, he didn’t have the same visibility into the engine that the factory diagnostic software gives.
He told me something I didn’t expect. “I can’t see what the engine computer sees when this machine is working,” he said. “If I start replacing fuel parts based on a guess, you’re going to spend a lot of money and maybe still have a broken excavator. You should let the dealer run it on their computer first.”
He could have sold us a fuel pump that day and walked away. He didn’t. That honesty saved us from an even bigger mistake, but it also meant we were back to waiting for the dealer’s service schedule.
The dealer tech arrived a few days later with a laptop and a fuel pressure test kit. He connected to the engine, asked our operator to run the machine through a normal digging cycle, and watched the live data.
It took about twenty minutes to find the problem. The fuel pressure dropped sharply whenever the engine was pushed to maximum output. The fuel supply pump was weak. It worked well enough at idle, but it couldn’t keep up when the machine was actually working. That explained the long cranking, the clean filters, and the power loss under load. The pump was slowly failing.
Because the 925E was still under warranty, the replacement pump and the labor were covered. We paid a service call charge for the mobile visit, and that was it. I remember thinking, “Okay, the repair is covered. So why does this still feel expensive?”
The answer is that a machine sitting still doesn’t just cost a repair bill. It costs schedule time, crew time, and confidence.
Our project superintendent had to shuffle the work plan while the excavator was down. The general contractor on that site didn’t ask which pump failed or whether the warranty covered it. All they saw was excavation work slowing down. That’s the part that sticks with me: in construction, the condition of your equipment becomes part of your company’s reputation. A parked excavator with its boom resting on the ground says something, even when the breakdown isn’t anyone’s fault.
Would I buy the LiuGong 925E excavator again? Yes. The pump failure was a component issue, and those happen on every brand of equipment. What I would repeat is buying through a dealer that could actually come out, diagnose it, and fix it under warranty. What I wouldn’t repeat is waiting so long before calling them.
Most buyers, including me, compare the obvious things: dig depth, breakout force, bucket capacity, price. Those matter. But there’s no spec sheet for the moment your machine stops working and you need the right answer fast.
If you’re looking at a LiuGong 925E excavator or any other machine, ask the dealer questions before you sign, not after:
These questions feel awkward when you’re still negotiating. Ask them anyway. When we compared machines, everyone asked about price. The better question is: who answers the phone when the machine is down, and how fast can they get here?
As for the fuel pump, the honest answer to how to know if fuel pump is bad is that you can’t always know from symptoms alone. A weak pump can hide at idle and only show up under load. That’s why the mechanics and dealer techs use fuel pressure gauges and live engine data. If you’ve ruled out filters, water, and obvious leaks, and the machine still loses power when working, a proper load test with diagnostic software is the next step.
I still order the occasional ab roller or pool pump for this company, and I still laugh when people think purchasing is just paperwork. But when an operator calls at 6:40 in the morning about an excavator that won’t dig, I no longer treat it as a machine problem. It’s a business problem. And the way you protect yourself is by choosing the dealer as carefully as you choose the machine.
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