Temporary Heating Rental Support
Important Considerations
In recent posts, such as Use the Total Cost of Renting (TCR) Method when Shopping for Temporary Heaters, we provide helpful tips on choosing a temporary heater that meets your needs and budget. We encourage readers to look beyond temporary heater rental costs (which may only be a couple of hundred dollars per month) to installation costs, fuel efficiency, heat output, and service costs when choosing heating equipment.
Another important consideration is the field support you will receive if something goes wrong with a heating unit.
When evaluating vendors, ask how quickly they respond to issues. If their response is a bit vague, ask if they keep an inventory of spare parts at regional offices near your site. Ask if their service trucks fully stocked. These kinds of considerations can help you determine their ability to respond to problems and minimize heater downtime.
Some companies rent or sell a range of heating equipment including generators and temporary heaters. It can be challenging to stock parts for all that heating equipment. Sometimes, companies deliberately keep spare parts inventory low. That may be good for their business, but it can mean trouble for yours.
If spare parts aren’t kept on hand, a vendor will have to order them from a manufacturer, which can take days to arrive and install. Some companies won’t repair heating units at all. Instead, they will swap-out a bad unit. This could take longer than a repair. In addition to the time needed to deliver a replacement unit, it must be set up. And there’s no guarantee that a vendor won’t charge for additional setup.
This means that if something goes wrong with a temporary heater, you could wait several days until your heater is back online! Is saving a couple of hundred dollars per month worth the risk of downtime? Compare these costs to the cost-per-day to operate your job site or to construction delay penalties.
So, be sure to ask your vendor about parts and service before you sign a contract. If you were to ask BABFAR customers, they would tell you that, if they have had a problem, their temporary heating unit was back online in a matter of hours, not days. They would tell you that BABFAR technicians respond immediately and bring over 60 different replacement parts so they can make repairs on site quickly.
Ensuring your heater supplier can respond quickly, the limiting factor of which is usually spare parts, will maximize heater uptime and keep your construction project running smoothly.
