It was about -28C last night and this morning found the water pipes frozen. We live in a mobile home and have heat tapes but they must not have been enough. I have 70,000 btu torpedo heat but it's over an hour away. There is a Home Depot about 15 minutes away so I went to rent a similar heater than runs on kerosene or diesel. $41 for 24 hours so pretty reasonable. Got the heater ready to go and they need a $25 deposit. Will only take a credit card. Had to sign on the debit machine and then it wanted a password. I never use my credit card except for online purchases where I don't need a password. I have no idea what the password is. They wouldn't take a debit card or even cash, had to be CC. Girl there says you can just go to your bank and get the password. I've kind of got an emergency here and no bank is open on Sunday. I drive back home and my partner comes back with her credit card. Fine, we get the heater and a 30" piece of vent pipe to use as a heat shield over the end of the heater. I also got a Jerry can for diesel. Didn't want to fiddle with my snow covered slip tank in -25C. Get the heater with the extension on the end all set up in an opening in the skirting. Fill it with about 15L of diesel. Plug it in and nothing. Then I noticed an on/off switch so turn it on. Hear the ignitor and the fan running but not igniting the fuel. Runs about 8 seconds and shuts off but there is a green light blinking. The pressure gauge on the back barely registers. Try a few more times and same thing. I'm pretty ticked off by now. Bring the now heavy heater into the back door to try and figure what's wrong. Look up the manual online and it says check filters. Managed to pull the foam air filter out hoping it was the problem. Plugged heater in and opened the door and it actually worked. Great except when I shut it off it had a plume of diesel fumes and smoke come out the back of the heater stinking up the house for hours. Anyway hauled it back down the steps and set it up to blow under the trailer. Was getting a little more fumes inside but water was starting to trickle after about 4 1/2 hours. 20 minutes later everything is thawed. Was very relieved because wasn't going to run it all night. The whole ordeal at HD was beyond frustrating. First they can't manually do a credit card so I have to leave and come back and then the damn thing didn't work. Isn't it standard practice at any rental outfit to make sure what they're renting works? What a pain! At least I got the pipes thawed but it's still a little smelly. Leaving a tap dripping slowly to prevent freezing again.
-25c seems pretty cold! Glad you finally got it running, though it sounds like quite the ordeal.
This happened to me when we got a two day polar express blast of -20ºF weather. I also had all the exposed pipes covered with heat tape, plus a layer of insulation. My pipes froze about 5 inches underground where the water entered the house. I dug down a little and took one of those clip on light bulb holders with the silver reflector and put a 100W bulb in it and stuck it pointing at the pipe. I then wrapped it with a couple of towels. I then crossed my fingers and prayed. I opened all the faucets in the house and waited. I checked on my setup every 20 minutes or so to make sure nothing was on fire (that would have REALLY ruined my day). It took about 2 hours for the water to flow again and fortunately, no burst pipes! What was really bad about that day was that the wind was around 20+ MPH and everything had to be done in the wind. When everything was over, I extended the heat tape to reach about 10 inches under the ground.
Passwords are just for debit cards. Never ever one for a credit card. Unless thats a Canada deal. No water connected to a shop in cold weather, don't like to go nuts running heat.
We don't sign for credit cards anymore. It has been a PIN number for years and years. I think all the banks are the same. I only deal with one of them so can't swear to that. d.d.
Password is a pin number but the machine said password. You can use a credit card like a debit card with a pin but I always just use my debit card. Purchases under a set limit don't require a pin. You can just tap. Some larger purchases have to be with a CC. When I had something fixed on my track loader I forgot the pin. The shop doesn't normally do manual CC but it would have been a big hassle to have to come back so they were able to do it the long way. Took the heater back today and thankfully there were different people at the rental desk. I asked if they had a pump to pump the diesel I bought out of the heater. First they said they had an electric pump but it quit working. I'm thinking I'm not giving away $20 worth of diesel to the next renter but then they found a manual pump and pumped it out. There is no way the bozos there yesterday would have pumped the fuel. In the end everything worked out great but I'm pretty tired and aching today. It was good the heater had a flat bottom. I slid it on the snow to get it to my truck. It must have weighed over 60lbs. full of fuel. Any heavier I wouldn't have been able to lift it in my truck. The cancer is in remission but I just don't have much strength.
It's about -13F and there was a little wind but not too bad.
Minus 21C right here now Dave, but going down to minus 31C tonight. Glad you got it going. Simon C
-35C tonight at my MX track in Thorhild county. Clearing the driveway can wait!
When it’s that cold, my back doesn’t want to do anything. Fells like my whole body is as brittle as the plastic air line.
Rental companies can sometimes be pretty lax about repairs. I've had a few bad experiences with them. Rented a 16' step ladder to change out light fixtures in a church. The thing was in rough shape with crude fiberglass patches all over it. Working on a 20' ceiling was only nerve wracking wondering when this time bomb of a ladder was going to break. An excavator was rented by a friend. He broke the bucket cylinder rod & the dipper stick. Next time I saw the machine it had a new bucket cylinder & the worst crude welded repair on the dipper ever. As years passed, the stick repair only got worse with revisions of the crude repair that kept breaking. Another friend rented a Terex backhoe. Bucket pin kept falling out. Rental company sent a "mechanic" with a role of wire & a pair of pliers. He wrapped about 50 yards of wire around the end of the dipper that got ripped off first flex of the joint.
I am so stiff today I can barely bend over. I take strong pain meds. daily but they don't help as much as I'd hoped they would. I've had a couple bad rentals. Rented a sod cutter that would only run 1/2 throttle with the choke on. Managed to get the job done and took it back. The idiot there was arguing with me how good the machine ran and he'd just tuned it up. I said start it and see how it runs. I'm not going start it, it runs perfect. Yeah, not so much. The other bad one was a small Mustang skid steer. I think it was a 910. It was way under powered to begin with but bogged right down and wouldn't back up a ramp to get out of a lower garden area. The air filter indicator showed red so I took the filter out to try and clean it some. It was packed with white dust!! I managed to get the job done and get it up the ramp. That's another story but I took it back and told them the filter was plugged. The guy said I should have brought it back. I said it was in a very tight space in a lower garden in a back yard 45 minutes away. It was only a 2 hour job. Again the guy I rented it from said it was just serviced. I told him I'll show you the filter and you can see the indicator is red. Nope, wouldn't go to see. Interestingly I ran into someone that worked for a company doing renovations on our hockey arena. He was very familiar with the machine I rented because it was the smallest skid steer available to rent at 36" wide. The company he worked for rented it for 3 weeks to haul away broken concrete and tons of concrete dust. They were using mini-ex's with breakers to take out old seating and stairs. He said the dust was unbelievable. Everyone had to wear respirators and visibility was really poor. Yeah, that explains why the air filter was plugged. I think the skids steer was only about 15 or 16 HP. Could barely move out of its way with a clean filter.
We have a surprising amount of rental houses (one I pass a couple times a day) around here and I'm convinced it's a money laundering operation. Granted, I haven't been in a lot of it but it all looks quite new and in good shape. I'd be pretty frustrated with spending a bunch of money on a rental that didn't work properly.
Especially when it's freezing cold and has to work outside.
My former brother in law (sister's ex) is brilliant & needs frequent change. He has had more jobs than I have had trucks. One job was setting up an equipment & tool rental company. He was sent to a "school" where he learned a formula to make equipment profitable. A large machine must produce income equal to its value in six months. A small machine must earn its value in three months. Any day a machine isn't rented is a loss. If the life of a machine can be stretched beyond reasonable expectations, that is pure profit. The company he set up for a very rich man has been sold a couple times. It still exists 20 years later. I can rent some of those first machines now.
We have the same thing around here. Newish rental companies with all new equipment and it just sits in their yard. Money laundering at its finest. We do have real rental companies, where you actually get used equipment and such. That’s a roll of the dice. I actually bought a used Cattepillar Agco Tractor/Backhoe from one of the main rental companies, they had bought it figuring they would rent it out with implements. They couldn’t figure out how to make the 3 pt hitch go down. I bought it, with a trailer for 11,500 and did my septic with it. Made a box blade and had a bush hog and York rake and some other things. To make the rear implement go down, you would have to function the loader. Looked at it for a bit and figured they never added a case drain. Problem fixed. Put 2k hours on it in 10 years and sold it, with the same trailer for 13,500. Was actually a pretty good unit. Full frame backhoe was okay.
Willie are you saying that a piece of equipment that cost 50k would need to make that 50k in 6 months? Bonkers. I guess the math kind of checks out at weekly rentals in the 1500-2k range, plus charges for moving the equipment. That's, apparently, not a business to get into then, if you can afford the overhead. I think y'all understood it but I just read my post above back and it looks like I'm talking about rental houses when I meant equipment rental companies...
I believe the statement was it costs less than six months rent. It isn't all profit, so no, it doesn't pay for itself in six months.