Customer Expectations Skyrocket When Renting a Restroom Trailer

In exchange for a premium rental fee, your clients raise the bar on cleanliness and functionality of your equipment. Thorough routine maintenance is how you meet those demands.

Customer Expectations Skyrocket When Renting a Restroom Trailer

Rich Anderson, of Jimmy’s Johnnys, is shown maintaining an Ameri-Can Engineering restroom trailer at Super Bowl festivities in Minneapolis in 2018. (File photo)

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Your customers rent restroom trailers for comfort and luxury, and they are willing to pay for it. In exchange, they expect a well-maintained trailer and quality service. To that end, a regular maintenance program is essential to maximize revenue on high-end rentals.

“It’s protecting the capital expenditure in a trailer. You spend anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 on a piece of equipment,” says Ryan Anthony of Satellite | PolyPortables. “It’s the initial first impression from your customer, and it’s just maintaining the value of your investment, long term.”

Anthony was among of a group of restroom trailer experts who gave a presentation on proper maintenance at the Portable Sanitation Association International conference earlier this year. He was joined by Steve Ghrist of Lang Specialty Trailers and Keegan Campbell of Ameri-Can Engineering.

Visual inspection

Restroom trailers should be cleaned after every rental, both to promote longevity and as a matter of customer service, but it’s also best to do your surface check during that cleaning.

“While you’re cleaning, that’s when you want to be performing a visual inspection on the trailer,” Ghrist says. “So it’s not just washing your trailer — it’s taking the time to make sure everything’s in good working order.”

“Typically any sort of damage you see is caused when you’re delivering these trailers in and out of sites. A lot of places people are delivering are event sites — somebody’s backyard,” Ghrist says. “You get there and you’ve got to pull the trailer through overhanging branches, and you get a branch that bounces off the air conditioner, vent fan or something like that and cracks the cover on it.”

It can be tempting to assume that if something’s wrong with your trailers, you’ll notice it out of hand. But seemingly minor issues can lead to larger problems if not addressed quickly.

“If a branch was to crack a roof vent or something like that and you get water pouring in through the roof, that can cause a lot of problems,” Ghrist says. “It could have been solved in 10 seconds by just identifying you have a problem.”

Ghrist recommends starting a routine visual inspection with the roof, inspecting the seals around the edges, the air conditioner and the vents for cracks that would let water in. It’s also a good idea to check gutter spouts, exterior lights, water inlets and plugs — anything that could get jostled or snagged while maneuvering into and out of a site.

This principle also applies to interior checks. Better to do a quick check after each service than to have a customer complain over some small issue during a rental.

“The interior is similar to exterior: You’re definitely cleaning the trailer between each rental. That’s the time to perform your inspection and test everything,” he says. “A lot of things happen during a rental, so you want to check everything out.”

Ghrist recommends testing all the faucets, flush pedals, lights and fixtures, as well as checking the stairs.

“Another big thing between rentals is making sure you have everything needed for install. So if you have a checklist, make sure you have your hose, blocking, wheel chock, level, deodorizers, toilet paper, hand soap, paper towels and garbage bags,” Ghrist advises. “That way you don’t show up to the site to set this trailer and not have what you need to get the job done.

“You want to inspect all your leveling jacks: Make sure they’re all in place and they’re not damaged. That’s a common one you see; you have a driver going to pick up the trailer, and they get it all ready, and they totally forget to lift the back jacks up, and they pull out and either bend or break off the back jacks on the trailer.”

Air conditioning units

Customers expect restroom trailers to be comfortable, and proper temperature is important for their satisfaction. As such, it’s somewhat surprising that air conditioning maintenance is commonly overlooked, especially when the maintenance is relatively straightforward.

First, know the power requirements of your trailer to ensure your air conditioner will work with the available electrical outlets at the job site. It’s also important to know the unit’s output capacity and set the thermostat accordingly.

“Having the thermostat set so it’s at a temperature the unit can keep up with is pretty important,” Campbell says. “If you have your thermostat set at 60 and it’s 100 degrees F outside in the sun, it’s just never going to catch up and take a break, so setting it at a temperature that is possible to keep up on is a good thing.”

Similarly, make sure the unit itself is ready for use.

“Make sure all of the vents for the air conditioning are opened in the interior. If you close the vents, it doesn’t allow the air to flow, causing the unit to start to freeze up or work harder,” Campbell says. “That’s kind of a simple one that gets overlooked.”

Beyond on-the-job considerations, regular cleaning of the air conditioner filters will increase the longevity of the units. Clogged filters lead to the unit overworking, which can cause short- and long-term failure.

“Keeping those filters clean — so when it is running, it’s not running at max capacity — is a big thing,” Campbell says. “When it’s clogged, it’s working harder, it’s getting hotter and that’ll usually cause failures more often.”

Fortunately, cleaning the filters is fairly simple.

“Routine maintenance on the air conditioners is to clean the return air filter every two weeks or as needed. This time of year, the white cottontail or all the pollen that’s in the air clogs them, so we recommend cleaning more often,” Campbell says. “That return filter is a foam filter that just filters out dust and debris. But they can be taken out, cleaned with soap and water, dried, and put back in; or they can be purchased and replaced on an as-needed basis.

“The second step is to remove the exterior housing of the air conditioner and blow out and clean the compressor and the fins on the evaporator,” he says. “That’s recommended just once a year, or if you’re in very, very dusty conditions, maybe once a month at most.”

Tank health

Of course, one of the most important components of a restroom trailer is the waste tank. Keeping it clean and maintained can mean the difference between success and failure in the eyes of customers.

“Generally these are going to nice, high-end settings, and as you pull up on site, the guest, your customer, wants to run out, open the door and look at it,” Anthony says. “If you don’t maintain that tank and take the precautions to control that odor, they’re going to get a pretty unpleasant shot when they first open that door.”

So proper maintenance both on the site and on the yard is essential.

“Never pull trailers with waste in them. It’s not recommended by any manufacturer to transport these trailers with waste in them,” Anthony says. “Not only is it unsafe, with the sloshing of waste back and forth, but depending on how they’re manufactured, you could get waste on top of tanks and you could get waste in places that you can’t get it out. Long term that’s going to lead to odors you can’t control and potential places for things to start to deteriorate.”

While the trailer should be pumped before transport, that doesn’t mean the job is done once its back on at the shop.

“As the trailer gets back on the yard, evacuate all the waste you can from the tank,” Anthony says. “Open up that clean-out port and use water to wash as well as you can, and just make sure you’re flushing all that waste out and make it as clean as possible for when you’re going to store it on your yard.”

Because restroom trailers are not always used daily and tend to sit days at a time between jobs, it’s extra important to plan for downtime.

“If it’s going to be sitting on the yard for more than a week at a time, they should go through that thorough cleaning. Opening the port, flushing the tank, getting out any paper that’s left behind,” Anthony says. “It’s just going to help control odors in the long run.”

After thoroughly flushing, some freshwater should be added with chemical deodorizer. It’s nearly impossible to get every bit of waste out, so prepping the tank for storage helps mitigate odors for the next rental. Anthony recommends 10% of the total tank volume added back in freshwater, and then the deodorizer manufacturer’s recommended dosage.

“Generally there is a layer on the bottom of the tank that just never comes out,” he says. “When you transport the trailer to the job site, that gets reactivated, stirred up and produces some pretty unpleasant odor.”

The exception to that is storage in freezing climates, where the deterioration of waste remnants is less of a concern due to the cold and you can’t let liquid sit in the tank. Steel tanks require extra attention to prevent rust when trailers are idle during long stretches.

Protecting the investment

Restroom trailers have rapidly become a popular choice for customers looking for enhanced portable sanitation service. The stakes are high, both from the higher fees charged for the service and the investment in this specialized equipment. The decision to offer restroom trailers must be accompanied by a commitment to maintenance.

“You charge a lot of money to rent these trailers, so to me it’s really important that you are washing them and waxing them and everything between rentals,” Ghrist says. “It’s what the customer expects.”



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