The pallet arrives at nine in the morning. Four flight cases, a screen in sections, a stack of stands, and a driver who needs a signature and then leaves. From that moment everything that happens to that equipment is yours: the lifting, the cabling, the testing, the operating and the packing down at midnight. That is dry hire, and for plenty of events it is the right arrangement.
The dry hire vs full production decision usually appears as one line on a planning document and gets answered on instinct. We think the honest answer depends less on the equipment than on what happens in the hour before doors open, and on who is standing in the room when it does.
Dry hire vs full production: the difference is who carries the risk
Dry hire means you take the audio visual (AV) equipment and nothing else. No technicians, no project manager, nobody on site. Wet hire, also called crewed or assisted hire, adds people to the equipment. Full production goes further: a supplier scopes the event, specifies the kit, builds it during the get-in (the load-in and build before the event), operates it while the event runs, and takes it out again at the de-rig.
Most comparisons stop at control and convenience: dry hire gives you control, full production gives you your day back. That is true as far as it goes. What it misses is that responsibility does not stay behind with the supplier when the van pulls away.
Hired equipment arrives with duties attached
The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations, usually shortened to PUWER, apply to equipment provided for use at work. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is explicit that the regulations reach organisations whose employees use work equipment, “whether owned by them or not”, and that equipment must be suitable, maintained in a safe condition and used only by people who have had adequate information, instruction and training. A hired lighting bar is still work equipment. Once your team is building a truss, running a public address (PA) system or driving a light emitting diode (LED) wall, those duties sit with you.
The HSE goes further on the training point. Its guidance on training and competence says everyone who uses work equipment needs adequate training, and that this applies to supervisory and managerial staff too. Adequate training covers the methods of use, the risks that come with it and the precautions to take. Somebody who watched a video on the train down is not trained.
Two more duties travel with the kit. Sound is the first: HSE guidance on noise in music and entertainment covers every workplace where live music is played, and places duties on employers, workers and freelancers alike. Hire a PA and run it yourself and your own crew’s hearing becomes your responsibility. Insurance is the second: employers’ liability insurance is a legal requirement as soon as an organisation takes on employees, so check how your policy treats the people you bring in for a single day.
None of this makes dry hire a bad idea. It does mean the decision comes with a duty holder attached, and that is rarely how it gets discussed.
When dry hire genuinely works
We hire equipment out without crew regularly, and it goes well when most of the following are true.
- You have technical people of your own, employed or long-standing freelancers, who have used this class of equipment before.
- The room is one your team knows, with a get-in you have done and power you have already used.
- The package is self-contained: a screen and a laptop feed, a small PA for speech, a few lighting fixtures on stands.
- Nothing is flown. Anything that goes above head height changes the conversation entirely.
- You have time. A build that has all day to go wrong is a different proposition from one that has ninety minutes.
In those conditions dry hire is not a compromise. It is the sensible answer, and pretending otherwise would be selling.
When it turns into more work than it saves
The pattern is consistent. Dry hire stops working when the number of unknowns rises above the number of people who can resolve them.
- A venue nobody on your team has worked in, with rigging permissions, load-in restrictions and a lift that decides what fits.
- Anything structural or overhead: truss, ground support, motors, weight loadings.
- Live switching between presenters, laptops and remote contributors, where somebody has to be watching a preview monitor while everyone else watches the stage.
- A single get-in window shared with catering, staging and the venue’s own contractors.
- No spare. A crewed job carries redundancy on the van. On a dry hire, a failed component at four in the afternoon is a phone call and a courier.
The other thing dry hire cannot do is answer questions on the morning. Specifying equipment before anyone understands what the event is for is how the wrong kit ends up in the room, and a delivery note is not the moment to discover it.
The middle ground most briefs never ask for
The choice is usually presented as two options. In practice there are more, and the useful ones sit between.
- Crewed build, self-operated show. Technicians rig, test and hand over, then return for the de-rig. Your team runs the day.
- A technician alongside your own equipment. We supply AV technicians to work with kit a client already owns or has hired elsewhere.
- Crew for the difficult part only. The screen build and the rigging get a crew. The rest is yours.
That last arrangement is closer to how good jobs actually run. One of our published testimonials, from Rick Stock on a video wall hire, describes the hire team giving sound technical advice up front and the install crew on site offering support with equipment that had come from the client’s other suppliers. Nobody planned that in the brief. It happened because there were competent people in the room.
Questions worth answering before you choose
- Who, by name, is operating this during the event, and what else are they doing that day?
- Has that person built this specific type of equipment before, in a room like this one?
- What is the plan if a component fails ninety minutes before doors?
- Who signs off anything that goes overhead, and can they evidence their competence?
- Does the get-in window survive contact with the venue’s other contractors?
If the answers come easily, take the kit. If two of them make you pause, the honest reading is that you need people as well as equipment. What changes the shape of a proposal is not mysterious either: screen size, run time, crew numbers, travel distance, install complexity and how restrictive the get-in is. Any supplier should be able to talk you through those factors before you commit to an arrangement.
Talk to us before you decide
We supply audio, video, lighting, rigging, staging, outdoor stage and LED video wall from one source, with nationwide delivery from our Manchester base. That means we can hire you equipment, crew a build, or run the whole event, and we would rather work out which of those you actually need than sell you the largest one. Splitting a job across three suppliers moves the coordination risk onto you, which is the thing we are usually asked to take away.
We are also not the right answer for every event, and we will say so. If you want a second opinion on whether your next event needs a crew, tell us what the room is and what is happening in it. Our event services page sets out what we do, and our guide to the questions to ask an AV supplier covers what to put to them before you book.
Get in touch through our contact page or email hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk, and we will give you a straight answer on what the event needs.
