Winters can be brutal in Wisconsin, so it’s ideal to store portable restrooms indoors for the season to protect them. Adam and Megan Wilson, owners of Ray’s Sanitation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, are lucky to have a cold storage building on their 14-acre property. But with over 400 units they had to be creative to make it work.
“We built a mezzanine in our shop where we can stack toilets above the ones on the ground,” Megan says. The building has 14-foot ceilings and their mezzanine level starts about halfway up. It not only gives them somewhere to store equipment but enables them to get some use out of an area that is otherwise just wasted space.
And they have just the right shop tool to lift units up to the second level — a mini articulated loader. “We have an Avant,” Adam says. “It’s like a little forklift, but it articulates in the middle so you can get into a lot tighter spaces and make some quicker maneuvers. It lifts them up there just fine.”
The Avant 420 from AVANT TECNO is 86 inches long, 43 inches wide and has a turning radius of 6 1/2 feet. It operates with a 22 hp Kubota diesel engine and has a 1,200-pound lifting capacity and a lift height of 108 inches. Over 200 attachments are available to use with the unit — pallet forks, blades, buckets, auger, snow blower, telescopic boom — connected with a quick-attach hydraulic system. Design options are also available, such as different cab styles or extra lights.
Wilson says they get a lot of use out of the Avant, mostly for loading and unloading their hauling trailers and moving units and pallets of supplies. But he’d like to use it more, he says. “I’d love to take it to job sites on occasion — but, of course, that would require another truck and another trailer to haul it, with the way the setup is. But we really enjoy that thing.”
Read more about Ray’s Sanitation in the March issue of Portable Restroom Operator magazine.
