Is Your Rental Business Prepared for Disaster?

Blizzards, tornadoes, and hurricanes all spell disaster as do myriad other events. Try as you might, dealing with them can be overwhelming. Communication and travel are likely interrupted and when customers finally contact you, there’s only one thing on their mind, “can you help me get up and running.” This help usually comes in the form of generators, small ones for homeowners who need to keep their lights on and freezers operating and larger ones for offices and retail operations where power demands are much greater. It’s the old saying, you don’t know how much you miss something until you don’t have it, and electricity has to be at the top of most missed and most wanted list. There’s another old saying, equally axiomatic: “In an emergency, there’s never enough of everything to go around.” The immediate challenge then is how to meet demand for product and services.

Loftin Equipment Company’s generator fleet includes 43 units that rangein size from 20kw to 1 meg. Its most popular is the 200kw generator that has a 60- to 70-percent utilization rate. Next are the 350 to 400kw units at 60-percent utilization rate, followed by our 100kw generators that come in at 30 percent. During a disaster not all of these units will be in-house nor will the company likely have the precise size that a customer would need.

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