I wanted to extract steel - mostly nails and screws from a burn pile. A conventional screw pickup sweep was not practical so I tried this. The magnet is heavy but reasonably well sealed and dragging it through the debris with my backhoe bucked worked OK but in the end I think by hand with a rope would have been just as easy as long as you have a place to hang the magnet while you release it. It takes two hands to release the magnet. Most of the nails dropped right off and the stragglers pulled off easily. I pulled out 30-40 lbs of nails in 15 minutes filling a 5 gallon bucket. A few more sessions to go though.