If you supply car performance substances such as oil, fuel additives, or anything of the same then you know how dangerous they can be if they are mishandled. If you can keep them off the floor and away from other chemicals then that is a very good thing. Your materials may be slick, flammable, or explosive in some cases. Therefore, making sure that they are secure and in place on their respective storage shelves is a very good thing for you and your customers.
One of the biggest threats to your products, if they are on pallet racks, is the product falling off the back of the shelf. Why? There are several reasons that include the reasons in the previous paragraph. Moreover, there is an important thing that you need to do and, honestly, local governments want you to do it as well. There is a concept called flue space. In general, flue space refers to keeping a defined space free and clear of obstructions so that any fires are contained to the area and are, therefore, easier to put out with sprinklers. Any products that fall into this flue space causes a problem. Anything in this flue space will cause a fine if they find that product sitting in your flue space.
What do you do about this problem? You use something like pallet rack back guards. Pallet rack back guards keep products on shelves. However, you should know that you should not use these as backstops for your racks. They are designed to give away before your rack because of the propensity of people to do this action. What happens if you do use them in this fashion? Most pallet racks become warped over time and the rack becomes unstable. The rack has a high chance of injuring someone or a crowd of people. Therefore, the only thing you should use these backstops to do is to make sure your product stays on the shelf or rack levels. Subsequently, your products stay on the rack levels and they stay out of the flue spaces around your storage solutions.
Another thing to protect against is the possibility that any of your forklift operators have a moment of distraction and crash into your racks. You may think that there is no protection against this and the answer is that there is depending on the speed of the contact. The answer is a column guard. A column guard has many different variations including proprietary versions. However, any of them can do a good job of taking contacts from forklifts as long as they are placed appropriately. The good news is that you can use multiple column guards and get as much or as little coverage as you want. Obviously, the only limitation is the cost of getting full coverage. Therefore, you pick as much protection as you want and the column guard will do the dirty work of protecting your products.
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