Sunbelt Rentals showcases ‘complex project’ capability at UK event

Sunbelt Rentals UK attracted more than 500 customers plus around 600 of its own staff to a product and technology showcase in Liverpool designed to illustrate its capacity to undertake complex projects using multiple products.

More than 20 suppliers - including JCB, Wacker Neuson, Dingli, Sany, Trime, Hilti, JLG, Husqvarna and Hilti - displayed equipment at the ACC Liverpool exhibition venue, with Sunbelt staff on hand to talk to customers.

Phil Parker, CEO of Sunbelt Rentals UK & Ireland, speaking to International Rental News in Liverpool, said the event had a twin purpose, to give its own staff a better appreciation of the full range of equipment and services they offer, and to demonstrate to customers the ability to undertake major projects requiring a wide range of equipment.

The event saw dozens of suppliers to Sunbelt Rentals show their latest products and innovations. (Image: KHL Group)

He said Sunbelt had the largest, most diverse fleet of any rental business in the UK - encompassing earthmoving plant, accommodation, power, aerial platforms, fencing and more - but that it was its ability to deliver a coordinated response across multiple products that was its key differentiator.

Parker said the company had to do more than the standard “transactional” rental business, and shift towards managing more complex needs, whether in events, utilities, infrastructure or construction.

Products on show

In support of that approach the company is investing in a wide range of products, many on show at the venue on the banks of the Mersey.

One example is its floor preparation, cleaning and maintenance division, which showed products including autonomous cleaning robots from Tennant, Lionsbot and Pudu Robotics.

The division now has a fleet of around 4,500 cleaning products with total value of £10 million, supplying facilities maintenance companies, commercial cleaning contractors and major facilities.

A spokesperson for the division told IRN that as much as third of its investment this year will be on robotic cleaners.

He said the rental division was benefitting from a trend towards shorter duration cleaning contracts, which leads cleaning contractors to rent rather than buy because of uncertainty around future workloads. In addition, the rental market for robotic products is “huge, because the technology is changing so quickly.”

Sunbelt is also investing in its temporary trackway division and showed in Liverpool its new Sabre-X temporary matts which come in 4.0m by 2.0m dimensions and are 100mm thick. These are larger than its traditional 3.0m wide matts.

A Tennant robotic cleaner on display as part of Sunbelt’s floor cleaning, preparation and maintenance business. (Image: KHL Group)

The new matts - which are manufactured for Sunbelt by Isokon in Slovenia - mark a first step into the ‘big matt’ sector of the market and are suited to sites with heavy loads and difficult ground conditions.

The matts weigh 360kg each and can be handled by Sunbelt’s existing fleet of around 70 trucks. As many as 5,000 of the new trackway units will be added to the fleet this year, alongside is existing 3.0m aluminium matts.

New power modules

New power technology was also evident in Liverpool, with one of Sunbelt’s suppliers, Trime, showcasing not just its own lighting towers but also a new European sales alliance with US company ANA to market its battery-based power modules.

These units look like standard battery energy storage systems (BESS), but are designed solely to be used alongside a diesel genset. They use Lithium Titanate Oxide (LTO) batteries and, said ANA, will reduce fuel use, emissions and maintenance costs by 80%.

Safety technology on show included proximity alarm technology from Safety Shield. The company has been developing and marketing human form detection (HFD) technology for many years. These are used to highlight unsafe human movements round mobile machinery using a series of detection technologies coupled with AI analysis.

John Guest, the company’s founder and CEO, speaking in Liverpool at one of the open seminars, said the technology is 99.6% accurate at detecting humans with a 0.05% false detection rate.

Around 20,000 machines worldwide are already using the company’s HFD systems and Sunbelt has been using the technology since 2019.

Sunbelt’s temporary trackway division showed its new Sabre-X 4m wide matts. (Image: KHL Group)

‘Sentry’ anti-theft system

The company is now launching several new iterations of its technology. Sentry will use the same detection technology to provide an anti-theft and vandalism solution for when machines are idle at night or weekends. It just requires the addition of a battery and some new software

The company is also introducing a new operator display designed to reduce the amount of information displayed to operators in their cab, offering alerts only when something is wrong.

Finally, Sunbelt Rentals and contractor Balfour Beatty are piloting another new product from Safety Shield called Nexus.

This will integrate a wide range of data, including machine telematics as well as HFD information to detect and categorise risks.