Caked equipment hides the things you need to see. Hydraulic weeps, cracked welds, worn pins and leaking seals all disappear under a season of dried clay, and they reappear as an unplanned failure. Cleaning heavy equipment is a maintenance step that happens to also make the machine presentable.
A1 Mobil washes equipment where it sits — active jobsites, laydown yards, rental lots and shop pads — which matters because a tracked machine is expensive to move and the wash is not worth a lowboy trip.
Equipment washed
- Excavators, dozers, loaders and skid steers
- Cranes, boom lifts, scissor lifts and telehandlers
- Backhoes, graders, compactors and rollers
- Forklifts and yard equipment
- Dump trucks, water trucks and haul units
- Drill rigs and support equipment
The reasons this gets scheduled
Four moments drive most equipment cleaning. Before a sale or an appraisal, because a clean machine appraises higher and sells faster than an identical dirty one. Before transport, because caked soil crossing jurisdictions is a regulatory problem and a road hazard. Before a service interval, because a technician cannot inspect what they cannot see and will charge you for the time spent cleaning it themselves. And at the end of a job, because returning rented equipment dirty draws a cleaning charge that exceeds what the wash would have cost.
Containment on a jobsite
Equipment washing produces the dirtiest runoff of any service here — soil, hydraulic oil, diesel and grease in one stream. On an active site that runoff reaches a storm inlet, a ditch or a neighbouring property, and the site operator owns the consequence. The containment process is identical to the fleet process: seal the inlets, recover the water, haul it off. On sites with their own wash pad and interceptor, the crew works to that instead.