Moving bouncy castle and party equipment is a business that runs on weekends, weather and a very tight delivery round. Between May and September an operator can be setting up four or five bookings on a Saturday, collecting them the same evening and doing it again on the Sunday. Extra capacity at short notice is the difference between taking a booking and turning it away. Arranging van hire in Warrington covers a busy weekend or a broken-down vehicle, and bouncy castle van hire is really a question of volume and wet weight.
An Inflatable Is Heavier Than It Looks And Heavier Still When Wet
A rolled castle is a dense, floppy, awkward mass that two people move by dragging rather than carrying, and a full-size unit is a serious lift. Add a blower, a groundsheet, anchor stakes, a rain cover and the crash mats and one booking fills a surprising amount of a load area. The complication that catches new operators out is water. A castle collected wet after an afternoon of North West drizzle weighs considerably more than the same castle collected dry, and if two or three come back wet on the same evening the load is a different proposition from the one that went out. That is worth allowing for when working out how many bookings a single vehicle can realistically cover in a day rather than discovering it at eight on a Saturday night.
Choosing For Floor Space And Roof Height
Rolled inflatables are bulky rather than tall, so what matters is floor area, with enough height to stack a second unit and the blowers on top. A long wheelbase high roof van is the natural choice, giving the length to lay a full-size castle flat and the height to work inside rather than crawling. Where an operator is covering a single booking or running smaller units and soft play, a short wheelbase medium roof van is easier on residential streets and turns in a driveway, which matters more than it sounds when four of the five deliveries are to houses.
Loading A Round In Delivery Order
Load the last delivery first. It sounds obvious and it is the discipline that collapses on a busy Saturday when everything gets thrown in to save five minutes, costing twenty at the second stop. Keep each booking together as a set, with its blower, stakes, groundsheet and cover, ideally in a labelled bag tied to the roll, so nothing is left behind at the wrong address. Blowers are heavy and hard-cornered and should sit on the floor rather than on top of an inflatable where they can chafe the fabric. Stakes and mallets go in a crate, never loose, since a steel stake sliding about in a load area will find a seam.
Keeping Units Clean And Dry Between Bookings
Fabric that goes away wet comes out mouldy, and a mouldy castle is a unit out of service in the middle of the season. Where the weather forces a wet collection, get the unit out and inflated to dry as soon as you can rather than leaving it rolled overnight, and never stack a dry unit under a wet one in the van. Grass cuttings, mud and grit all work into seams and stitching, so a groundsheet used properly at every set-up saves a great deal of cleaning later. Keep the load area swept, because whatever is on the floor ends up on the next customer’s castle.
Safety Paperwork And Who Is Driving
Inflatable hire carries obligations that go well beyond transport, covering testing, anchorage, supervision and insurance, and none of them are affected by which vehicle brings the unit. What does change with a hired van is the driver. The person named on the hire must be the one collecting it, bringing a photocard licence and a DVLA check code rather than a credit card, so a seasonal helper cannot simply be handed the keys unless the hire is set up for them. Every vehicle we run sits at or under three and a half tonnes gross vehicle weight and is driveable on a standard category B car licence.
Booking Extra Capacity For A Busy Weekend
The pattern that suits this trade is taking a vehicle from Friday and returning it Monday, which covers both weekend days and the Sunday collections when we are closed. We are open Monday to Saturday from 8am to 4pm and closed on Sunday, so a Sunday evening collection round always means a Monday morning return. Short and long term hire are both available with no deposit required on most vehicles, and booking at least two weeks ahead brings a ten per cent advance booking discount on selected vehicles, which suits a diary filled well in advance. Operators covering Birchwood van hire and Culcheth van hire areas find the depot central to a typical round.
Storing Units Between Seasons
The season ends and everything has to go somewhere until spring, which is the point at which a badly stored fleet turns into an expensive one. Units must be completely dry before they are rolled for storage, and completely dry means inflated and left until there is no damp in a seam, not merely dry to the touch. Store them off a concrete floor and off an outside wall, because both draw damp, and keep them where mice cannot reach them, since a rolled inflatable makes excellent nesting material and the damage is not repairable. Blowers should be stored somewhere dry with their cables coiled rather than kinked. Moving a whole fleet into a storage unit at the end of the season is a job in itself, and it is worth doing properly in one go rather than in car loads across November.
Tell us how many units you are running in a weekend and whether collections are Sunday evening, and we will sort a vehicle and a period that fits the round. Call the depot on 01925 396 222 before the season gets busy.
