How To Choose The Right Forklift For Your Needs

If you’re in the market for a forklift, you will already likely have some idea about how many options there are on the market today. Although this ensures a lot of versatility for the wide variety of jobs that exist out there, it also means that choosing the right forklift can be tough. After all, choosing the right forklift for your needs can ensure far greater productivity, while choosing the wrong one can very easily set your entire work schedule back. With forklifts being such an essential aspect of any warehouse, we’ve put together a few great insider tips to help you find the perfect forklift for your specific requirements – read on to get up to speed!

The first thing you’ll need to consider: power

When deciding on all of the options when you’re looking for new forklifts for sale, there are quite a few things you’ll need to consider, whether they be power requirements, load capacity, warehouse size, lift height and more. Power requirements for forklifts basically relate to whether they are powered by electricity, gas. Electric forklifts, a much newer kind of forklift as compared to gas-powered models, will have a higher up-front cost and higher cost of operation and maintenance, but they will also generally have a longer life span, provide greater manoeuvrability and are less noisy than other forklifts. It is also often the case that charging the battery takes a very long time. Gas forklifts offer lower maintenance costs will still providing a long lifespan, and refuelling is much quicker as compared to charging an electric forklift. The downsides for these models typically relate to their emissions, noise,  and requirements of fuel storage. Diesel forklifts offer both power, reliability and low running costs, but also suffer from the need to have fuel stored and are only suited to open spaces.

Other things you’ll need to keep in mind

After you’ve worked out what power you might want your forklift to have, the next thing you might want to consider is load capacity, as this can also factor into the forklift power decision. This is because smaller electric forklifts won’t be able to lift the same amount of weight as their gas and diesel-powered cousins, which makes electric forklifts better for more standard warehouse applications, such as food warehouses, books, clothes or similar products. If you’re looking to move large industrial objects, a diesel-powered forklift might be more your speed. With this in mind, giving some thought into what you need moved should give you a clearer picture of the kind of forklift you need. One of the other important considerations you’ll need to make is lift height, as this will factor in heavily into the style of warehouse you have and the load-carrying capacity of the forklift unit. 

What forklift is right for you?

If you have a firm understanding of what you need moved around your warehouse, whether it be inside or outside and what your approximate budget and warehouse space looks like, you should be able to develop a pretty good understanding of what forklift you need. For example, a small warehouse that needs fresh produce moved will likely go for an electric forklift, while a large, spacious warehouse that stores raw metals and similar materials outdoors will benefit from a diesel forklift.