The short answer on wet hire vs dry hire EWP
Dry hire is the machine on its own and you supply the operator. Wet hire includes a ticketed, insured operator. Dry hire is cheaper per day; whether it is cheaper per job depends entirely on whether you already have a licensed operator available.
Dry hire is the machine on its own. Wet hire is the machine with a ticketed operator in it. On paper dry hire is the lower rate, and for a lot of jobs it is genuinely the right answer. For plenty of others it quietly costs more.
Here is how to work out which one your job actually wants.
Wet hire vs dry hire EWP: what each one actually includes
| Dry hire | Wet hire | |
|---|---|---|
| The machine | Yes | Yes |
| Operator | You supply | We supply |
| High risk work licence | You hold it | We hold it |
| Familiarisation on the unit | Your responsibility | Ours |
| Operator insurance | Yours | Ours |
| Headline rate | Lower | Higher |
| What you organise | A licensed operator, every day of the hire | A start date |
The licence is not optional above 11 metres
A boom-type EWP with a boom over 11 metres requires the operator to hold a high risk work licence in Victoria[2]. On the taller machines, dry hire is only available to you if you genuinely have a licensed operator. It is not a preference at that point, it is a prerequisite.
When dry hire is the right answer
You already have ticketed people
If your crew holds the licence and is on site anyway, you are paying twice for an operator you do not need.
The machine is on a long programme
Over a three month hire, a daily operator charge compounds. If you can crew it yourself, dry hire is usually well ahead.
Your people know the work
Nobody understands your job better than your own crew. On specialised work that familiarity is worth more than a hired operator’s speed.
You want the machine standing by
On dry hire the tower is yours for the term, whether it works every day or not. That flexibility suits programmes that stop and start.
When wet hire is the right answer
You do not hold the ticket
The most common reason, and the simplest. Wet hire takes the whole licensing question off your desk.
It is a short or one-off job
Training and familiarising somebody for two days of work rarely makes sense.
The work is genuinely difficult
Tight access, awkward angles, work near conductors. An operator who runs these machines every week finishes faster than one who does not.
You want one thing to organise
A start date and an address, and a machine with a person in it turns up. On a busy programme that is worth real money.
Dry hire is cheaper per day. Wet hire is often cheaper per job. Which one you want depends on whether you have a licensed operator standing around.
The middle ground people forget
A long hire does not have to be one or the other for its whole term. It is entirely normal to start a programme on wet hire while your own people get familiar with the machine, then move to dry hire once they are comfortable and carded on it. We do this regularly and it usually works out better than committing to one arrangement on day one.
Worth asking at quoting stage
Ask whether the hire can change arrangement mid-term, and what notice that needs. On our hires it can. Knowing that up front changes how you plan the first fortnight of a long job.
Whichever you pick, the machine still has to turn up
Wet or dry is a decision about who stands in the basket. It is not a decision about whether the tower is on your job on Monday, and it is worth separating the two, because the second one is what actually costs money when it goes wrong.
A dry hire with no operator is still stopped if the machine is stopped. A wet hire with a ticketed operator is stopped in exactly the same way, and now there is a person standing there as well. So the question worth asking of any hire company, before the rate, is what happens on the morning the machine will not go.
Our answer is the same for both kinds of hire. You call the workshop first, because a surprising share of faults are talked through and cleared in a few minutes. If it needs a look, somebody comes and looks at it. And if it genuinely has to come in, a replacement tower goes out so the crew is working the next morning while yours is being repaired. We try hard to avoid getting there at all, which is what the three-monthly inspection, the six-monthly electrical test and the annual load test are for. Maintenance is either scheduled or it is a breakdown.
What does not change either way
Whichever you take, the machine has to be a compliant one. Every tower we own is electrically tested every six months, inspected with the covers off every three months and load tested annually, and the current certificate travels in the cab[5]. And whichever you take, if the machine has to come away from you, a replacement comes out. That is how the hire works from the first day rather than something you negotiate for.
What each arrangement actually costs you
The day rate is the number people compare, and on its own it decides very little. A wet hire rate carries the machine and a ticketed operator; a dry hire rate carries the machine alone. Comparing the two directly makes wet hire look expensive, because you are reading a figure that has a wage inside it against one that does not.
The honest comparison puts your own costs on the dry hire side of the ledger. An operator on your books carries a wage, superannuation, insurance and the cost of holding a high risk work licence current. If you already employ ticketed people and they are on site anyway, that cost is sunk and dry hire is plainly cheaper. If you would be putting someone on specifically to run the machine, the gap narrows fast and often closes entirely.
The third figure is the one nobody quotes for, and it decides more jobs than the first two: what a stopped machine costs you. A crew standing around is the most expensive thing on any site, and it is the reason the comparison between wet hire vs dry hire EWP is really a comparison of who absorbs the risk when something goes wrong.
| Dry hire | Wet hire | |
|---|---|---|
| The machine | Yes | Yes |
| Operator | Yours, ticketed | Ours, ticketed and experienced |
| Operator wage and on-costs | On your books | In the rate |
| Maintenance and testing | Ours | Ours |
| Delivery | It drives itself | It drives itself |
| Minimum term | Three months | None |
| Contract | Yes, walked through with you | Not needed |
The three-month minimum, and what it buys you
Standard dry hire runs a minimum of three months. That is a deliberate figure rather than an arbitrary one, and it is worth understanding because it explains the whole shape of the offer.
An insulated tower is a machine worth well over three hundred thousand dollars, and putting one out on dry hire means handing it to a crew we are not standing next to. That risk gets priced into a term long enough to make sense on both sides. A three-month floor also lets us plan the maintenance around your programme instead of interrupting it, which is why longer hires tend to run more smoothly than short ones rather than less.
What the term buys you is planning. We know when your machine is due for its three-month inspection, its six-month electrical test and its twelve-month load test, and we schedule the swap around your work rather than yours around ours. On a two-week hire there is no room to do that.
If the job is shorter than three months, the answer is wet hire rather than a shorter dry hire. That is the route we point people at, and it exists precisely so a short job is not forced into a contract that does not suit it.
What happens when the machine stops
This is the part of the decision that does not appear on either quote, and it is the part that costs real money. Machines with a lot of moving parts and finicky sensors have issues. New or old, they all do at some point. The question worth asking a hire company is not whether it happens, it is what happens next.
We start on the phone. Decades of running these machines means a great many faults get identified in a call rather than a visit — a leg that will not set is usually a leg sensor, and that has been narrowed down to a single wire over the phone before now. It sounds like a small thing and it routinely saves half a day.
If it needs hands on it, our mechanic is available the same day. Behind that sits two diesel mechanics, a full-time auto electrician with more than thirty years’ experience, hydraulics specialists five minutes down the road from the workshop, structural crack-testers and our engineer. We also have workshop contacts around Melbourne and Dandenong who will fit one of our trucks in the same day because they know us, where a stranger with a broken machine gets told they are booked out.
And if the truck will not move at all, a replacement tower comes out to you and yours comes back to the workshop. That is standard on both wet and dry hire, not a favour and not conditional on whose fault it was. It might not be the identical model while yours is away, but there is always a machine ready to go and you are not sitting around waiting on it.
One cost worth stating plainly: if a machine fails through wear and tear, we never charge you to run a truck down and back. That is our machine and our maintenance.
Who carries the licence
In Victoria a high risk work licence is required to operate a boom-type elevated work platform with a boom length of eleven metres or more. Every insulated machine we hire is over that threshold, so on a dry hire the ticket sits with your operator and the responsibility for holding it current sits with you.
On a wet hire it sits with us. Our operator arrives with the ticket, the familiarity with that specific machine, and the experience of having run it on jobs like yours. For a business that does not otherwise need a ticketed EWP operator on staff, that is often the whole reason wet hire makes sense.
Neither arrangement changes what the machine itself permits. An insulated tower is what makes work on or near an energised asset possible, but it is not permission to do that work. The approval comes from the asset owner and the requirements come from Energy Safe Victoria. Hire the rated machine and get the approval separately.
Damage and insurance on each arrangement
Damage gets handled in two tiers, and conflating them is what makes hire companies sound difficult to deal with.
Small fixes and cosmetic damage — a hose, a scuff, a minor knock, a bent cover — are worked out directly between us. A hose might be fifty dollars or five hundred; either way it is cheaper and faster for both sides than a claim. That is the tier most incidents fall into.
Large-scale damage is different. Damage to the boom, the basket or the truck itself is an insurance job, and the paperwork for that sits at your end. We give you whatever you need from us to get it moving. What we do not do is claim to run your insurance claim for you, because that would be a written undertaking to manage someone else’s claim on a machine of that value, and it is not ours to manage.
What we do guarantee is the part you actually care about: you keep working. A replacement tower goes out while yours is repaired, on either arrangement, and downtime stays as close to nothing as we can make it.
On a wet hire, with our operator in the seat, the exposure profile is simply different — the person running the machine is ours and knows it.
Five questions that decide it
If you want the decision in one pass, these five answers settle it more reliably than comparing rates.
| Question | Points to dry hire | Points to wet hire |
|---|---|---|
| How long is the job? | Three months or more | Under three months, or a one-off |
| Do you already have ticketed operators? | Yes, and they are on site anyway | No, or not free |
| Is the work continuous or intermittent? | Continuous programme work | A burst of work then nothing |
| How well do you know the machine type? | Your crew runs them regularly | This is unfamiliar to you |
| Do you want the contract conversation? | Fine, we walk through it with you | Would rather not, no contract needed |
Every client’s situation is different, and if the answers land in the middle we will work out something that suits. The contract is only ever the starting point.
What long-term clients end up doing
The pattern across our client base is worth knowing, because it is not what people expect when they first ring.
Dozens of our clients hire year after year. Many are into their fourth and fifth year running, and a couple have been hiring from us for more than a decade. Almost none of them started with a long dry hire. They started with a machine for a job, found the arrangement worked, and the hire simply continued.
That matters to the wet hire vs dry hire EWP question because it suggests the decision is less permanent than it feels. Plenty of clients begin on wet hire because the first job is short or unfamiliar, then move to dry hire once the work is steady and their own operators are ticketed. Some go the other way when a crew changes.
Speed is usually the surprise. About a week’s notice is comfortable for a booking, but it has been considerably faster when a job needed it — one Melbourne job rang on a Friday, and was working with the machine on the Monday morning.
When a hire does end, early cancellation is worked out as a percentage based on the weeks remaining. We would rather have that conversation than have a client sitting on a machine they no longer need.
Which machine suits which job
Every tower in our fleet is an insulated EWP, so the question is never which one is better. It is which one carries what your job needs. Three figures decide it — working height, outreach and basket capacity — and a fourth, the insulation rating and the conditions it holds in, decides whether the machine can be near the line at all.
Working heights below come off the compliance plates rather than brochures. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure it is shown as on request rather than estimated, because a made-up spec on a hire page is a safety problem rather than a cosmetic one.
| Machine | Working height | Outreach | Basket | Insulation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GMJ LL22.350 | 23.5 m | 13 m | 350 kg | 66/33/LV on the plate |
| Redmond Gary TF17M | 19 m | 13 m | 325 kg | 132 kV — dry, wet and precipitation |
| Sherrin 18 m | 18 m | 11.1 m | 350 kg | 132 kV, Glove & Barrier build |
| GMJ TT16.300 | 17.5 m | On request | 250 kg | On the plate — ask us for your job |
| Terex Hi-Ranger LT40 | 13.8 m | 9 m | 181 kg | ANSI Category C under A92.2 |
| Versalift SST-37 | 12.8 m | 8.5 m | On request | Fitted as an option — ask first |
| Altec AT30C | On request | On request | On request | On request |
The tallest tower we run, and the one that goes out when nothing shorter will reach — 13 metres of outreach still intact at full height, on a basket that takes two people and what they bring down.
Rated 132 kV dry, wet and in precipitation, which is the rating that matters when the job does not stop because the weather turned. Long outreach for its height.
A Glove & Barrier build on a 350 kg basket. The one to ask about when the work is close-quarters on live gear rather than simply near it.
A mid-height tower that gets into ground the bigger machines cannot. Ask us for the plate figures against your specific job rather than working off a brochure.
Compact and quick to set up, rated ANSI Category C under A92.2. Suits tight residential access where a full-size tower simply will not fit.
Low travel height, which is what gets it under a carpark header or a low branch line. Insulation is fitted as an option, so confirm it before the job is booked.
A compact telescopic tower. We publish figures off the compliance plate rather than the brochure, so ask us and we will send the plate for the unit going to your job.
Every tower above travels to Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and Gippsland — driven to site under its own power, not floated in on a separate truck.
Which one to take when the forecast is against you
This separates the fleet more than height does, and it is the question people ask last.
An insulation rating holds under stated conditions. Most insulated towers carry a rating for clean, dry conditions and a lower one for wet. The Redmond Gary TF17M is the one certified across dry, wet and precipitation at 132 kV, which is why it is the machine that goes out when rain is forecast and the work cannot wait.
That is not a mark against the others — it is what that particular machine has. For everything else in the fleet the rated conditions are on the plate, and the practical answer is to tell us the job and the forecast and we will tell you which tower is rated for it. We would far rather have that conversation on the phone than have you find out on the day.
Two things do not change with the weather: the six-monthly electrical test that confirms the machine is safe to be working with and around live power lines, and the fact that a replacement tower comes out if yours has to leave you.
Tree work near the line, and work on the line
Nearly everything our towers go out on is one of two jobs, and they pull in different directions.
Tree work near a live service is about reach and what comes down. You are standing off the conductor and working over or around it, so outreach matters more than raw height, and basket capacity matters because limbs come back with you. The GMJ LL22.350 and the Sherrin 18 m both carry 350 kg for exactly that reason.
Work on the line itself is about the insulation rating and the conditions, and often about getting into a tighter spot at a lower height. That is where the Terex Hi-Ranger LT40 earns its place — a light Class 5 chassis with a fibreglass boom that goes where a bigger truck cannot.
We are arborists as well as machine specialists, and the towers are out on our own tree jobs every day. That is why the fleet is shaped the way it is rather than standardised on one model.
Whatever you call it — insulated EWP hire, travel tower hire, cherry picker hire, a bucket truck, a boom lift or a man lift — describe the job and we will match the machine to it.
Insulated EWP hire across Victoria
Every tower is a truck, so it drives to you under its own power and sets up on its own legs. There is no float to book and no crane at either end, which is why distance behaves differently for us than it does for hire companies working off floated plant.
We hire right across Victoria. Beyond the towns above we run into Dandenong and the outer east, right through Gippsland where we are based, and up into the north-east — the Wangaratta and Wodonga side of the state is no trouble at all, we are over that way regularly. If your job is somewhere not listed here it is almost certainly still covered: insulated EWP hire across Victoria.
Tell us the job. We will tell you the tower.
Wet hire or dry hire, anywhere in Victoria, with a replacement machine behind it from the first day.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between wet hire and dry hire?
Which one is cheaper?
Can I dry hire without a high risk work licence?
Can I switch from wet hire to dry hire during a long hire?
Does wet hire include a groundie as well as the operator?
Who is responsible for site safety on wet hire?
Is wet hire more expensive than dry hire?
Can I switch from wet hire to dry hire part-way through?
Is there a minimum hire period on wet hire?
Who is responsible for site safety on a wet hire?
What happens if the machine breaks down on a wet hire?
Do I need my own insurance for a dry hire?
How much notice do you need for either arrangement?
Does the machine come on a float either way?
Read next
Valley Wide Tree Services / 1800 GO TREES
Insulated EWP hire, Victoria
We run and maintain our own fleet of insulated elevating work platforms from a workshop in the Latrobe Valley, and we have been putting machines on Victorian jobs for years. Everything here is written from running them, not from a brochure.
Sources & references
- WorkSafe Victoria — High risk work licence: What a high risk work licence covers in Victoria, who needs one and how it is obtained.
- WorkSafe Victoria — Safe work practices using elevating work platforms: The regulator’s practical guidance note. States that a boom-type EWP with a boom length over 11 metres requires the operator to hold a high risk work licence.
- WorkSafe Victoria — Elevating work platforms: The Victorian regulator’s guidance on selecting, setting up and operating an EWP, including the duties that sit with whoever controls the workplace.
- Elevating Work Platform Association of Australia: The national industry association for elevating work platforms, and the body behind the Yellow Card operator familiarisation programme.
- Standards Australia — AS 2550.10, Cranes, hoists and winches: safe use of elevating work platforms: The standard covering inspection intervals, operator requirements and the periodic major inspection regime that a hire fleet’s service schedule is built on.
General information only, current at the time of writing. Requirements change and every site is different. Confirm the rules that apply to your job with the relevant authority and with whoever controls the workplace before work starts.
