Texas First Rentals™ prefers Perkins power
Texas First Rentals™ is a sister company of HOLT CAT®, the largest Cat® dealer in the United States.
“We have a simple rule of thumb that covers most of the equipment we purchase for the fleet,” explained Texas First Fleet Manager Taylor Graves. “If it’s Cat equipment it’s powered by a Cat engine – but for the rest, our preference is Perkins engines.”
The Texas First rental fleet includes Perkins-powered products from major OEMs including Genie®, Sullair®, Allmand® and many other top-tier manufacturers. There are numerous Perkins powered units in the fleet, Taylor says, including light towers, compressors, trenchers, aerial work platforms, welders, pumps, and generators.
Taylor cited the 1,000-hour maintenance interval as a major competitive advantage for equipment powered by Perkins engines.
“Consider an oil or gas rig work site that might have anywhere from 10 to 30 light towers running. We have to dispatch a technician to the site to do an oil change, and the rig operator loses the use of a tower while it’s being serviced. On a 250-hour interval that would happen to every tower every 10 days and on a 500-hour interval just over twice a month. With Perkins 1,000-hour interval it only happens once a month. That’s a huge saving for us and a significant increase in uptime for our customer.
We did an extensive cost analysis on the value of a 250-hour maintenance cycle and found that it simply wasn’t economically justifiable,” Taylor said.
Parts availability is another reason for preferring Perkins-powered equipment.
“When demand is high, as it has been recently,” Taylor explained, “finding parts can be a struggle and we had our share of challenges with most of our OEMs, but not Perkins. Between the breadth of their distributor/dealer network and the opening of their Regional Logistics Center in Kentucky we were almost always able to get the parts we needed quickly.
“For example,” he continued, “we lost several boom lift engines over a short period of time recently and needed some extraordinary support to get them replaced. The Perkins Rental Support Program, the distributor network and their manufacturing operation responded and we had new engines to install within 10 business days. It’s hard to find that kind of support anywhere today, but Perkins always seems to come through.”
Texas First also participates in Perkins Rental Support, Dealer Loyalty, SmartEquip™, On-Line Ordering and Replacement Engine Programs. They are evaluating the Perkins® SmartCap and Perkins® My Engine App for future implementation in the fleet.
Perkins powered Allmand light tower is a ‘bright’ choice for the rental industry
Light towers have become a rental industry staple for applications ranging from remote oil and gas rigs and construction sites to concert venues and special event parking lots. Regardless of the application, customers expect a light tower to provide continuous, reliable illumination on demand with a minimum of user/operator attention and maintenance downtime.
