Portable Toilet Servicing: Are yours accessible?

Portable toilets – The essential item for any venue or space where ‘spending a penny is essential,’ but access to mains sewerage is a challenge. Though overlooked by many, their maintenance and servicing are just as important as their presence on site and their accessibility is key.

Whilst you may know that portable toilet servicing is essential to the longevity and cleanliness of your portable toilets, you may need to rethink your location and ease of access so ultimately your service can be carried out unobstructed.

Difficult to reach locations, tight spots and unstable surfaces can all pose problems for waste disposal experts like us at D-tox and can prevent your portable toilet being serviced - impacting on its cleanliness and usefulness on site.

To ensure that doesn’t happen, use our checklist to make sure that your portable toilet is as best placed as possible to be serviced.

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1. Do we know where you are?

Do we have your exact address and postcode? Remember if we’ve received a purchase order from your company, we may have your head office’s address rather than your toilet’s location address.

The more information we have about the address the better, and we will put all the info on the notes for our drivers. So, if you are up the track past the big blue skip behind the green garages let us know and it will save our drivers time trying to find you.

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2. Can a service vehicle reach your toilet easily?

Can a large vehicle reach your location? Are there any physical barriers to reaching you such as a locked gate, narrow access, or other vehicles or machinery to negotiate?

Portable toilets aren’t the most attractive of items but placing them in difficult to reach areas like behind skips, on the far end of a muddy field or behind walls can also pose difficulties. All these challenges could limit pipework access or prevent our vehicle from getting near enough to the toilet to handle waste disposal. Our service drivers will always do their utmost to give you’re the best experience possible, but there are limits to the amount of pipework we can carry!

Locked gates are a particular challenge which can prevent a service company’s access to the area, site, or property in which the toilet is placed. Ensure gates are open, or we have the codes / keys to gain access, or alternatively ensure someone is onsite to allow us entry.

3. Getting the right vehicle for the job.

We have assorted sizes of vehicles that hold various volumes of waste, talk to us about your location and any challenges we could face to access, such as narrow lanes or tight site access. This could affect what size of vehicle we send to you.

Hiring portable toilets for a wedding with a large outdoor venue and worried it could become problematic? Find out all you need to know about what, and what not to do here.

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4. Ensure no tools and equipment are stored in the toilet

This might sound obvious but on construction sites we do see portable toilets double up as additional storerooms. Whilst this is relatively harmless during the building process - provided the tools or pieces of equipment aren’t infringing the functionality of the toilet in any way - when it comes to servicing time, any tools or equipment being stored in the toilet should be relocated ahead of the vehicle turning up.

5. Ensure construction does not occur around the toilet

We understand that when portable toilets are based on residential or commercial building locations, the siting of portable toilets can sometimes be overlooked in relation to continuing building around the toilet.

This can pose difficulties when it comes to either toilet collection or servicing. At Dtox we’ve experienced walls being built around portable toilets which has led to toilets being craned out of site! So, ensure that portable toilets are in (relatively) construction free zones, that allow for easy access.

6. Provide full access to your service team

Finally, the most important thing is to double check that your service team has full access to your portable toilets. If you live in a complex or at an address that has locked gates, or entrances that require codes - provide the code to your team or drop a set of spare keys into them. Make sure that there is access for vehicles and that the toilet is easy to locate, in an area which is not soft underfoot or has rough terrain.

As long as you leave toilets accessible nobody even needs to be on site at the time of the service . At D-tox we provide contactless and signature free job cards. We will send evidence of our service to you with photographs via email.

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7. Low archways are mostly a no go 

Our service vehicles are pretty bulky, so it’s really important that you talk to us about the volume of waste you wish us to remove, as this will affect the type of vehicle we send.

Because of the height, width and weight of the tankers, low archways can be particularly tricky. If you will be hiring portable toilets and the area does have low archways, for example at a wedding venue, consider placing the toilets in areas accessible for a large vehicle.  

If you are unsure whether our vehicle will be able to pass, ensure that you enquire with us first and we can talk through the details we need to know to make certain we send the right vehicle.

Use our guide to portable toilet dimensions to check against the width and height of your alleyways or archways. 

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8. The front / back garden debate

Though portable toilets are common sights on large construction sites, portable toilets can also be used on residential refurbishment and construction sites too. Quite often homeowners don’t want portable toilets in their front garden.  

Although this is perfectly understandable, it poses problems to waste disposal experts as access is limited and there will be many obstacles to overcome. The further away the vehicle is from the toilets, the harder the job will be. Pipework may not be able to reach depending on the distance between service vehicle, obstacles, and your toilets.

If you are a property owner hoping to install portable toilets, we recommend they are in an area such as the front driveway which would be accessible to run pipework to, or for a service vehicle to reach.

Need your Portable Toilet serviced or cleaned?

At D-tox we can service your own portable toilet, welfare cabin or any other item of sanitation equipment on a weekly emptying & cleaning service, or in a time increment that is necessary. 

Contact our friendly team for your quote today!

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Further Reading

Toilet Cleaning And Servicing During Bank Holidays

Weekly Servicing - the Key to Portable Toilet Hire

Four Signs You Need To Service Your Portable Toilet

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