Demand In Rental Equipment Outstrips Equipment Ownership
Changes, Challenges & Current Trends
Air-Met Scientific has been supporting our customers with equipment rental for more than 20 years. Over the past ten years and in particular since the GFC in 2008, we’ve witnessed an ongoing trend with our customers moving away from equipment purchase to equipment rental.
As more customers turn to equipment rental, we interviewed our National Rental Manager Andrew Marom to get his views on the biggest changes, challenges and current trends.
“Customers are spending more time considering the complete lifecycle costs of equipment; they are more aware of the forgotten or hidden costs of equipment ownership like decontaminating, office space, time to manage, down-time during maintenance, maintaining calibration records, depreciation and holding costs” says, Andrew.
“Our biggest challenge right now is the increased demand on particular items in our rental fleet due to both the state and federal governments current focus on infrastructure spending and the exit of Thermo Fisher Australia’s Rental Division in September this year. But this is a great problem to have. The feedback we’ve been receiving from each of our six rental offices is that there is a shortage in the industry for equipment ranging from landfill gas monitors, water quality meters, sound level meters and dosimeters, PIDs to laser methane detectors. This increase in rental demand has resulted in an increase in advanced bookings for all equipment in all states to secure rental equipment for their jobs.”
As a result of the increased rental demands, Air-Met has taken some proactive measures to minimise the impact of these recent changes on customers and has invested over $1M in new rental items which include an additional 55 YSI Pro Plus Water Quality Meters, 30 SKC Air Sampling Pumps and 55 Solinst Interface Meters. Additionally, Air-Met has also increased their telemetry and remote power options for much of their rental fleet, extended the battery life for low flow groundwater sampling and broadened their rental brands and products in their fleet to include the RKI Instrument Eagle 2 Gas Monitor and QED Well Wizard.
