Facilities Maintenance Equipment

Facilities Maintenance Buying Guide

The collection is mostly protection, so start there. Count the products and this is a guarding catalog with a facilities department attached. The largest block by far lives in Protective Barriers: bollards, guard rail, rack and machinery guards, car stops, speed bumps, and safety gates that all do one thing, which is put a rated steel or polymer part between a moving hazard and something you cannot afford to replace. Bollards alone run from a $65 short steel pipe post up to fold-down and removable styles near $240, and a bolt-together heavy-duty guard rail run is rated to 12,000 pounds of impact and prices from roughly $1,160 to $2,070 depending on length and rib count. The rest of this page is the working gear that keeps the building running, and each family below points to its own collection so you can go deep once you have picked the lane.

Match the bollard or barrier to the impact it has to take. The first question is whether the threat is a vehicle or a person. Concrete-fillable steel pipe bollards in Schedule 40 pipe are built to absorb a forklift, sweeper, or truck strike and protect building corners, dock equipment, and storefronts, and once anchored and filled they become a fixed structural stop. Where the post has to move, fold-down bollards ($121 to $223) and removable bollards ($167 to $239) clear the lane for deliveries and lock back in for daily duty. Softer hazards call for softer parts: plastic and rubber bollards, molded rubber speed bumps ($50 to $124) to slow forklift traffic, and steel car stops ($40 to $391) to set a consistent parking depth. Buy the impact rating the traffic actually generates, because an overbuilt bollard that blocks a route people need gets removed, and a removed barrier protects nothing.

Guard the racking and the machines, not merely the aisles. Most warehouse damage happens at ankle height on the rack upright, where a fork or pallet corner shears the leg that holds tons of product overhead. Vestil rack upright guards start around $25, structural rack guards run $46 to $188, and a bolt-down pallet rack end guard is about $229, all inside Protective Barriers. The same page carries low-profile machinery guards ($41 to $476) and surface-mounted removable machinery and rack guards ($230 to $303) that ring a machine base or a control panel so a passing cart cannot reach it, plus column and I-beam protective pads for the building steel itself. Guarding is the cheapest insurance in the plant: the guard costs tens or low hundreds of dollars and the rack collapse or machine strike it prevents costs thousands plus downtime.

Safety railing is a fall-edge and separation job, and OSHA sets the numbers. Guard rail keeps traffic apart; safety railing keeps people from falling. Under OSHA 1910.29 the top rail on a standard guardrail system sits 42 inches above the walking surface, give or take 3 inches, and the system has to withstand a 200-pound force applied down or out at the top rail without failing, with 150 pounds on the midrail. Our steel safety railings price from about $55 to $210 by length, and aluminum railings from $146 to $355. Steel gives you the lowest cost per foot and shrugs off shop abuse; aluminum weighs far less, will not rust on a wash-down or outdoor run, and installs faster with a smaller crew. Pick the material for the environment, then size the sections and baseplates to the run you are protecting.

Air movement and heat for the space itself. When the guarding is handled, the building still has to be livable and workable. Industrial Fans & Heaters covers the climate side: commercial floor fans ($178 to $202) and industrial-duty circulator fans ($383 to $958) to move stale air and cool a work cell, shutter-mounted exhaust fans to pull heat out of a roofline, and variable-speed air curtains ($2,191 to $6,749) that hold conditioned air inside an open dock door. On the heat side you get quartz and infrared heaters ($348 to $680 for the quartz units), larger fixed infrared units, and portable electric salamanders ($1,360 to $3,448) for spot heating a bay in winter. Size these to the cubic footage and the door openings, not the floor area alone, because an open dock changes the math.

Fluids: transfer pumps and hose reels. Fluid handling gets its own two pages. Fuel Transfer Pumps are 12-volt and 115-volt electric units matched to what they move: diesel pumps ($280 to $355), heavy-duty fuel pumps ($577 to $794), and 115-volt oil pumps ($752 to $1,138). DEF gets a dedicated pump ($496) for a reason, because diesel exhaust fluid corrodes most metals and any diesel or oil residue in a shared pump contaminates it, so the industry runs stainless or plastic-wetted equipment kept separate from every other fluid. Keep the lines off the floor with Industrial Hose Reels, where spring-driven low-pressure reels ($168 to $347) retract air and water hose out of the walking path so it never becomes a trip hazard or a forklift casualty.

Floor and housekeeping hazards. Two smaller families close the loop on daily hazards. When a hose or power cord has to cross an aisle, Cable Protector Ramps armor it: extruded aluminum crossovers ($23 to $633), urethane crossovers ($126 to $267), and rubber ramps rated to 4,000 pounds ($19 to $64) that let a pallet jack roll the line without crushing it. Metal debris on a shop floor is a puncture and tire hazard, and the magnetic push sweepers ($26 to $267), manual brush sweepers ($221 to $235), and forklift-hung magnetic sweepers ($167 to $459) in this collection pull it up in one pass. To mark all of it, Portable Sign Bases hold up wet-floor, traffic, and safety signage, from $11 portable and permanent bases to complete sign base systems ($207 to $277).

Storage, packaging, and waste at the end of the line. The back end of a facility is storage and shipping, and both live here. Storage Racks runs from economical material racks ($95 to $220) and carton flow racks ($276 to $3,016) to cantilever rack kits rated 1,000 to 2,800 pounds per level ($875 to $2,804), plus Valley Craft welded workbenches and locking cabinets for tools and flammables. When the pallet is built, Packaging Equipment has hand-held stretch wrappers ($42 to $244) and full stretch-wrap machines ($3,026 to $3,273), strapping tools, and floor scales to weigh and secure the load. What comes off the line as scrap goes to Waste Handling Equipment: tilt trucks ($371 to $857), powered self-dumping hoppers rated 6,000 pounds ($4,095 to $5,045), and box dumpers ($6,996 to $12,890) that invert a full container into a bin without a manual lift.