If you have hired machinery from plant hire services for a site that you are working on for a considerable time, you do need to consider how to keep the site safe overnight when the contractors have gone home until the next day’s work. If criminals manage to break into a site overnight, they can not only steal expensive and much needed equipment and machinery, but they could also damage it. This can be costly in terms of money but also in terms of time lost.
Here are some top tips for keeping your site safe overnight and looking after your plant machinery in the process.
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Install gates and fences
The first thing for any site is to ensure that there are robust and durable gates and fencing. These should preferably be solid so as to prevent any prying eyes from seeing into the site from the outside. That way, any criminals potentially looking to break in won’t know if it’s worth it because they can’t see what is on the other side of the fence. They also need to be tall enough to prevent people from easily scaling them to climb over.
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Install strong lighting
Lighting is not only a good thing for contractors and workers on site during working hours. Of course, they do provide that level of safety during those hours, but big floodlights around the perimeter of the site, and lighting up machinery on site, will make it much more difficult for someone to steal them. Security lighting and motion lighting around the entrances and potential vulnerable positions around the edge of the site will also do a good job at deterring criminals.
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Lock up equipment and machinery
Once the property is secure, you then need to consider how to keep the machinery itself safe. Use sturdy locks and padlocks, on top of locking the doors to those machines with cabs for operators to sit in. A cheap padlock or locking mechanism would be so easy for a seasoned criminal to break through, so always make sure you have installed the most secure locks and padlocks that you can.
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Motion sensor cameras
CCTV installation in construction is also a good way to keep a site safe overnight, with motion detection cameras in particular a good way to keep your excavators, forklifts, cranes, and bulldozers safe from theft. A good camera system helps you to keep an eye on the entire site overnight and see if there is any suspicious behaviour that you need to address.
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Make use of good plant hire services
The best plant hire companies in the UK utilise the latest and greatest technology in their plant hire machinery and equipment. Tech such as the most up-to-date GPS tracker and similar technology, is a great deterrent to criminals, and in the worst-case scenarios you can track where your stolen equipment and machinery actually is.
Keeping a site safe overnight means implementing a few key strategic safety measures such as strong hard fencing and locks, security lights, as well as making the most of the latest technological features that your plant hire equipment and machinery should have installed if you work with a reputable plant hire company in the UK, including GPS tracking so you know exactly where your machinery is at any given time. Machinery that is stolen or damaged can cause a big problem for any project that has a site that is left overnight. It can cause delays to the project itself where you lose time and money. By implementing effective processes, you can ensure these problems are limited.
