The True Costs of Owning Used Steel Sheet Piling

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By Lee Wilczynski

Any time you use and/or handle steel sheet piling on a project it costs money! But we all know that handling sheet piling is inevitable so the question is–Should you rent or own?

There are a dozen problems you may have when you own your own steel sheet pile, and your accounting department will probably neglect to show you your true costs, which include…

• NOBODY BOTHERS TO RECORD AN INVENTORY REPORT WHEN IT COMES BACK INTO YOUR YARD.
• Nobody knows what kind of pile it is?
• Nobody knows what to do with it WHEN IT COMES BACK from job and just unloads in a stack with no cleaning or trimming.
• When you need some piling, you need 40’ and all you have in the yard is 20’
• When you need piling all you have in the yard is all 40’ and the field needs 20’ you chop good valuable pile in half.
• You have a yard full of 40’ and next job requires a minimum of 45’.
• You ship the pile you have at the yard and the crew spends two unproductive days just trying to sort stuff out that should have been done in your yard.
• You ship the pile from your yard and crew finds out that more than half was torn up on last job and pile isn’t usable.
• You ship the pile back to the yard and everyone forgets you have it and rents more anyway.
• You need more pile than you have in the yard, but it won’t interlock with anything currently available.
• You ship pile from your yard and find out that, although it looked like you had enough, you still can’t find enough to build a good cofferdam–You rent anyway to get what you need, and the balance is used for miscellaneous shoring jobs that come up.
• You need to ship some of your pile from the yard right away, and your yard crane breaks down.
• The worst problem your accounting system never figures–the true cost of owning pile and that renting could be cheaper and more efficient.