Anyone running a few acres or a livery yard knows that the jobs come in bursts, and van hire for a smallholding tends to be about coping with those bursts rather than about daily transport. A feed and bedding run, a delivery of fence posts, a load of hardcore for a gateway that has turned to mud again, and none of it fits in a car. Plenty of the people who book van hire in Warrington for this kind of work are running smallholdings out towards the Cheshire plain and simply do not need a dedicated vehicle sitting on the drive for the other fifty weeks of the year.
Why An Open Body Suits Yard Work Better Than A Box
The instinctive choice is a panel van, and for feed sacks in the rain it is the right one. For most other yard work it is not. Fence posts, rails, gates, bags of aggregate, pallets of blocks and anything delivered on a forklift all want an open body, because loading over a side is dramatically easier than threading a load in through rear doors. A flatbed dropside van takes a full pallet from the side without anyone having to lift it twice, and it lets a merchant load you rather than you loading yourself. All our vehicles are 3.5 tonnes gross vehicle weight or under and drive on a standard category B car licence, so there is no extra entitlement to worry about.
Feed, Bedding And The Weather Problem
Bagged shavings and haylage do not want rain, so if that is the whole trip a covered van is the better answer. A long wheelbase high roof van holds a serious quantity of bagged bedding and keeps every bag dry, and the roof height means you can stack rather than spread. Where people go wrong is trying to make one vehicle cover a mixed trip. If you are collecting bedding and posts on the same day, either sheet the posts on an open bed or accept that the bedding will need covering, but do not assume you can fit long timber into a high roof van because you cannot get it past the bulkhead.
Working Out What A Pallet Actually Weighs
Aggregate is where yard hires most often go wrong, because a bulk bag looks modest and is anything but. A single bag of sand or ballast is heavy enough that two of them will use a serious share of what a 3.5 tonne vehicle can legally carry once the vehicle’s own weight is accounted for. Ask the merchant for the weight rather than guessing from the size, and if you are collecting two or more bags, plan on two trips rather than one optimistic one. Our explanation of what payload really means sets out how the arithmetic works in practice.
Gateways And Tracks Around Frodsham And Northwich
Getting to the yard is often harder than loading. Customers using Frodsham van hire for land on the hill deal with steep narrow lanes where a long wheelbase is a genuine liability at the passing places. Out towards Northwich van hire country the lanes are flatter but the field gateways are frequently soft well into the autumn. A loaded van on soft ground is very easy to strand and very expensive to recover, so keep to hardstanding wherever you can and reverse in rather than driving in and hoping to turn.
Securing A Load On An Open Bed
An open body puts the responsibility for the load squarely on you, and that is a fair trade for the loading convenience. Long timber wants strapping in at least two places and never at just one, because a single strap turns the load into a pivot. Anything loose goes under a net rather than a sheet, and a sheet on its own is not a restraint. Load heaviest items over the axle rather than at the tail, keep everything below the height of the headboard, and walk round the vehicle before you move it. Then walk round it again after the first mile, because straps bed in and slacken far more than people expect.
Fitting The Hire Around Deliveries And Our Hours
Merchants and feed suppliers keep their own hours and so do we. Our depot is open Monday to Saturday from 8am until 4pm and closed on Sunday, so a Saturday collection is the usual pattern for weekend yard work, with the van back with us on the Monday. If your supplier only loads on weekdays, an early weekday collection at 8am gives you the whole working day. Booking at least two weeks ahead also qualifies you for our 10% advance booking discount on selected vehicles. There is no deposit on most of our vehicles, so pinning down a date early is easy enough to do.
Seasonal Clearances And What Comes Back
The other half of yard work is removal rather than delivery. Old fencing, rotten pallets, cleared brambles and the accumulated scrap that gathers behind every barn all have to go somewhere, and an open bed loads that sort of material far faster than a panel van does. Keep anything that might blow out under a net without exception, and check what your local household waste site will and will not accept before you set off rather than after you have loaded. The same thinking applies to plot work, and our piece on allotment handovers and plot clearances covers that ground.
Tell us what you are collecting, where it is going and what the access is like at the yard end, and we will match you to a vehicle that will actually get there. Call us at the depot on 01925 396 222.
