working for equipment rental places

I just recently left a gig hauling dedicated OSOW heavy equipment, and started working for a local equipment rental company (a small, 3-store family run outfit). Getting ready to head in in a few minutes actually. What is it you'd like to know? I'll get back to you at the end of the day when my shift is over.

Safe travels.

 

from what i have seen here in my area, the trucks sit more then they are delivering or picking up, which means your most likely gonna do warehouse work, or stay home a lot. which means, you may be paid on a 2 tier system. lower hourly for inside work, and higher hourly for driving.

this is how Lowe's tried to pay me, and i walked off after one month.

 

I'm currently a field tech for an equipment rental outfit. We have a couple drivers and a couple trucks. It seems like a pretty good gig they have going. Consistent hours and pretty steady work. When they have no equipment to haul I usually see them cleaning their trucks/trailers (lots of mud around here).

You would get all kinds of experience in operating equipment and proper load securement. In a typical day you might load and unload 3 or 4 different types of equipment.

 

I spent 4 years working for a 75+ store regional rental chain (I can PM you the name if you want). It's in the RER top 10 but not as big as Ahern or United.

I hauled everything from 12' lifts to 125' boom lifts and mini-skidsteer loaders to full size front loaders and excavators. We had 4 drivers so once a month you would be the "on call" driver so if a customer is using something at 2am on a Saturday and it breaks, you have to take a new one to them ASAP. The other 3 weeks of the month we had a semi-regular schedule of 07:00 - 17:00 but that was subject to customer demands. I've been in as early as 03:30 and stayed as late as 23:00. Though our branch record was another driver who was on the clock for almost 20 hours. He was sent to Colorado from Albuquerque, NM to pick up a broken down forklift. Yeah, he was WAY over his HOS but the company didn't give two ####s about it.

The reason I bring that up is that I see United and Ahern guys running up and down the highway at all kinds of hours so it's not always a "guaranteed" schedule. It's not uncommon to have to pickup broken down equipment and for that pickup to take anywhere from an hour to several hours extra.

I was paid $16 / hr when I ended up leaving and you were guaranteed to pull at least 45 hours per week though over 50 was common during the summer. In the winter when demand dropped off they still guaranteed a minimum of 40 hours or you could volunteer to go home early if you wanted to but they didn't force you to. If the drivers weren't busy then we would go help the mechanics in the shop, tidy up the yard, whatever.

Typically, we didn't have any real "deadlines". Our salespeople and dispatchers would give them a general idea of when to expect us when we delivered stuff. When we were doing pickups....anything goes. We got there when we got there and took as long as we needed to.

It's also not uncommon to sling chains and binders 15 - 20+ times per day and some pieces of equipment only needed 2 chains and others took up to 8. So you might sling 6 chains, bind them, drive 15 minutes, unchain everything, put everything on the rack, drive back and do it again. I ended up with a lower back injury and arthritis in my shoulder from having to do that.....it wears on you when you can easily throw over 50 chains and binders in an average day.

Depending on the climate where you are, it can be a good thing or a bad thing. Out here the weather isn't normally too bad but you can be sandblasted in the spring when the winds kick up. In other places where rain is more prevalent, you could quite literally be rolling around in the mud or snow trying to get a piece of equipment up and going or onto the truck.

If there's anything else you want to know, shoot me a PM or reply here....I can tell you more about it that you could possibly want to know.

 

Well, IronWeasel pretty much summed it up, at least as good as I could. My outfit, being only a 3-shop mom and pop is a little different. Only on real rare occasions do we start earlier than 0700 (I think twice in the 4+ months I've been here so far), and maybe half a dozen times have I worked past 1700, and even then the latest was probably 1830. We do sling a lot of steel, but the gig I had before this I was moving 2-4 80,000+ lb. machines a day; so I was throwing less times, but more and heavier chains then (1/2" almost exclusively). Also, we don't haul anything OSOW here, the biggest being 125' boom lifts (they're close to OW, but we avoid the scales when hauling those...lol)

Every other week I pull a 4-hr. shift on Sat. morning, but that is mostly just small rentals being returned so they can avoid being charged for the whole weekend. So not really much work on those days. During the week when we're slow, myself and the other driver at my shop will either do maintenance to the trucks, or pressure clean rental returns, or service (check fluids, blow out filters, etc.) returns, etc. They tend to frown on us doing actual repairs to rentals, as we have on small-engine guy, and one large equipment/aerial guy, so if something happens they know who to go to to ask questions....

I make a decent living, especially for my area, but would prefer not to post here (PM me if you really need to know). Suffice to say IW is in the general ballpark with his post, but I'd imagine that also depends on the economics of your particular area.

All in all not a terrible job at all, but I already miss hauling the bigger stuff, so who knows how long I'll be here.....

Lemme know if you have any other questions....

 

The company I was at paid the usual time and a half after 40 and since we were always guaranteed at least 40 (if we wanted it) during the "slow" months and were basically guaranteed 45 - 50 hours in the busy months. I was making $16 / hr (great for my area) up to 40 hours and then $24 / hr for another 5 - 10 hours. I think only once in the 4 years I was there did I go over 50 hours in a week, but I got close to 50 quite a bit and an extra 10 hours at $24 / hr gives you another $240 gross on top of your base pay.

And yes, there were frequent cases where I would have to load, unload, and reload equipment and it would be 30 minutes of chaining to take stuff 5 miles down the road. I did more loading and securing before lunch than the vast majority of OTR guys did in two weeks.