Further Reading — Chapter 13: Rentals and Production

Tier 1 = real, published, verifiable. Tier 2 = widely known practice, attributed without invented detail. Nothing here is fabricated.

The reading that is a price list

Get a full rental price list from a supplier in your market. (Exercise C.1)

Nothing on this page will do as much. A real price list tells you what exists — including items you did not know were rentable — what things actually cost locally, how delivery and labour are charged, and what the damage waiver is.

Then get a tent quote for a real site (C.2), itemized for all four subsystems plus anchoring and permit. The gap between what you have to ask for and what is volunteered is itself the lesson.

On tents and temporary structures

Tent manufacturers' and suppliers' technical material. (Tier 1)

Suppliers publish sizing charts, layout diagrams, anchoring specifications, and wind ratings, and they are genuinely useful. Learn: frame versus pole construction, sizing against configurations, flooring systems and when they are required, sidewall types, and — the one planners most need — wind load ratings and the conditions under which a tent will not be erected.

Read the sizing charts critically. They typically assume dining only, with no dance floor, band, bar, or buffet. §13.2's working-capacity method exists because those charts systematically undersize.

Industry association material on tent safety and installation. (Tier 2)

Trade bodies for the tent and event structure industry publish guidance on installation, anchoring, wind, and evacuation. It is written for installers and is worth twenty minutes for a planner, because it tells you what the crew is legally and professionally obliged to do — which is what determines whether they erect on a windy Saturday.

On power

Any introductory guide to temporary power for events. (Tier 2)

Production suppliers and some industry publications cover this. You need: watts, amps and volts and how they relate; the 80% loading convention; generator sizing and the difference between prime and standby ratings; distribution and cable sizing; and voltage drop over distance, which is why the 140-foot run in this chapter's applied scenario is a specification question rather than a length of cable.

A basic electrical primer, aimed at non-electricians. (Tier 1)

Twenty pages. You are not designing anything; you are checking a number and asking a supplier an intelligent question. The single most useful thing to internalize is watts = volts × amps, and that a 20-amp 120 V circuit is 2,400 W nominal and 1,920 W in practice.

⚠️ A caution. Do not specify, connect, or modify anything electrical yourself. §9.1's "coordinate, do not perform" applies with particular force here — electrical work is licensed work in most jurisdictions, and a planner who plugs something in has taken on an exposure that no amount of arithmetic protects against.

On sequencing and dependencies

Any introduction to critical path method. (Tier 1)

Recommended in Chapter 1's further reading and load-bearing here. §13.4's dependency chain is a critical path in miniature, and the formal treatment gives you three things this chapter uses informally: the critical path (the longest chain of dependent tasks, which sets the minimum duration), float (how much slack a non-critical task has), and the distinction between dependent and merely scheduled tasks.

Case Study 1's failure is precisely a schedule in which every task was scheduled and none was sequenced. Twenty pages of CPM would have prevented it.

Theatre get-in and film unit-move practice. (Tier 2)

Both fields solve exactly this problem — a large physical installation into a borrowed space with a hard deadline and one attempt — and both have far more developed practice than events. Theatre in particular has a vocabulary for it (the get-in, the fit-up, the strike) and a culture of sequencing that events would benefit from.

If you can get to a theatre get-in, do. It is Case Study 1's mini-project done by professionals.

On the physical items

Foodservice and hospitality supply catalogues. (Tier 1)

For understanding what things are and what they are called: chafers, hot boxes, cambros, banquet carts, glass racks. A planner who can name equipment precisely writes better RFPs and is taken more seriously by caterers.

Linen sizing charts. (Tier 1, from any supplier)

Memorize four: 120″ round covers a 60″ table to the floor; 132″ covers a 72″; 90 × 132 covers a 6-ft banquet; 90 × 156 covers an 8-ft. Everything else you can look up. Getting this wrong is the second-most common rental error and it is entirely preventable by knowing four numbers.

On the events side

Allen, Judy. Event Planning. Wiley. (Tier 1)

Her production and logistics material is oriented toward corporate events and larger scales, where load-in and strike are formalized and staffed. Read her treatment of production schedules, which is more rigorous than wedding practice and which Chapter 34 develops for large-scale work.

Special events and production trade press. (Tier 1)

Special Events magazine in particular covers rental, tenting, and production. Useful for seeing what is possible at scale and for tracking what equipment exists — the rental industry's inventory changes, and a planner who last looked in 2019 does not know what is available now.

Rental company staff. (Tier 1, and the best source)

The most knowledgeable people about rentals are the people who load the trucks. Ask a rental company's operations lead — not their sales contact — what planners get wrong, what they wish they were sent, and what makes a delivery go well. The answers are specific, immediately actionable, and free.

What to be careful with

Supplier guest-count charts for tents. They assume dining only. §13.2's method exists because of this, and using a chart will undersize a tent by 20–35% for any event with a dance floor and a bar.

"Turnkey" or "all-inclusive" rental packages. Sometimes genuinely comprehensive, sometimes a bundle of the profitable items with the necessary ones excluded. Run the §13.1 order against the package line by line and find what is missing. It is usually flooring, ceremony chairs, or bar glassware.

Your own estimate of how long something takes. Install durations vary enormously with crew size, access, and ground conditions. Ask the supplier, and ask them about this site, not in general. A tent company that has never seen a 180-foot carry across grass will quote a standard install time.

Any load-in schedule written as a list, including your own from last year.

A note on this chapter's numbers

The install durations, per-square-foot flooring costs, glassware ratios, and power figures in this chapter are Tier 2 — commonly used industry planning figures. They vary by market, supplier, crew, and site.

Two of them are worth verifying locally before you rely on them, because they drive the largest decisions:

Tent flooring cost per square foot, because it frequently exceeds the tent and therefore determines whether a raw site is affordable at all (Case Study 2).

Install durations, because they set the critical path and therefore determine whether an event can be built inside its access window (Case Study 1).

Exercise E.1 asks you to build the tent-cost model for your own market. It takes an afternoon and it is the single most valuable market asset in Part III.