For fleets
Fleet van washing: in-house vs mobile contractor (a real cost breakdown)
Should you wash your vans yourself or bring in a mobile contractor? An honest cost-and-time comparison for fleet operators, including the depot costs people forget.
Every fleet operator has the same quiet decision to make: wash the vans in-house, or pay a contractor to come to the depot. On paper, doing it yourself looks free. In practice it rarely is. Here is the comparison the way we actually see it operating depot schedules along the M4.
The true cost of washing in-house
The hosepipe is cheap. Everything around it is not. When you wash vans yourself, you are quietly paying for:
- Labour. A driver or yard hand washing vans is an hour-plus per van not spent driving or loading. Across a fleet, every week, that adds up fast.
- Water and drainage. Open washing creates run-off, and many depots are not allowed to let detergent-laden water reach surface drains without an interceptor. Containment and discharge can carry real compliance costs.
- Inconsistency. Vans get washed when someone has time, which means they often don’t. Presentation drifts, and a scruffy fleet quietly undercuts your brand on every road it drives down.
- Kit and consumables. Pressure washers, chemicals, brushes — bought, stored, maintained and replaced.
What a mobile contractor changes
A mobile contractor flips the model: the cleaning comes to your depot, on a schedule, done by trained operatives, while your vans stay on the road. HANDL’s fleet cleaning is waterless steam-based, which matters more than it sounds:
- No drainage infrastructure needed. The waterless method means no run-off to contain and no discharge fees — it sidesteps the compliance headache entirely.
- No depot downtime. We can clean outside your operating hours so the fleet is always ready when drivers arrive.
- Consistency. A standing schedule means every van is depot-ready every cycle, not whenever someone got round to it.
- Set-up is minimal. We bring the equipment; you provide a power point and a water tap, and our team handles the rest.
The numbers
HANDL fleet cleaning starts from £7.50 per van for a waterless exterior clean, and standing depot contracts run from around £15 per van depending on fleet size, frequency and the level of clean. The honest comparison is not "£7.50 vs free" — it is "£7.50 vs the loaded cost of an hour of your own labour, your water and drainage exposure, and the brand cost of an inconsistent fleet".
If you run an Amazon DSP
Amazon Delivery Service Partners are the clearest-cut case: tight margins, fixed routes, and a standard you are measured against. We run standing depot contracts for DSPs already — there’s a fuller walk-through on our Amazon DSP fleet cleaning page and a real (anonymised) case study. If you operate in our home patch, the Bristol and Cardiff fleet pages have the local detail.
Getting a number for your fleet
The right answer depends on your fleet size, depot and frequency. Tell us those three things via the DSP / fleet page and we’ll tailor a schedule and a per-van price — no obligation.
