Where to Put a Porta Potty
Most delivery problems are placement problems, and almost all of them are solvable the day before for nothing.
The truck has to reach it, twice
Once to deliver, and then every week to service. A vacuum truck works from roughly 100 feet of hose from where it can park, so a unit tucked somewhere clever at the back of a site becomes a weekly problem. Placement that only works on delivery day is not placement.
Firm and level
Soft ground after rain is the commonest cause of a unit ending up at an angle, and a tilted unit is a spilled tank. Gravel, hardstanding or plywood under the feet is enough.
Wind
An empty unit on an exposed site will blow over. Anchoring or strapping is standard practice in open ground and worth asking about rather than assuming.
Dry runs
A locked gate, a car parked over the spot, or nobody on site to point at it, and the truck leaves without delivering, and you are charged for the trip anyway. Confirm access, and tell them who will be there.
Distance from the thing people are doing
Close enough to use, far enough to be out of the way. For events, out of sight of the food and downwind of it. For sites, close to where the crew actually works rather than by the entrance.
Permits, neighbors and winter
On your own driveway or land, generally nothing is needed. On a street, a pavement or public land, the local authority usually wants to know, and that is a phone call worth making early rather than a fine later.
In freezing weather, servicing matters more than placement: a unit that is not emptied can freeze, and a frozen unit is out of action until it thaws.
Splitting the order across a site
On anything bigger than a house lot, one bank of units in one place is the easy delivery and the wrong layout. Walking time is the quiet cost: a crew crossing a plot twice a day, or festival guests queueing at one corner of a field, both trace back to units placed where the truck found it convenient rather than where the people are.
Tell the yard up front that the order splits across drop points, because it changes the delivery: several set-downs on one visit is a different job from one, and some yards price it separately. Keep every drop on a route the service truck can reach again in two weeks of mud, not just on delivery day. The festival page works a multi-bank layout through in full.
What actually stops a delivery
Most failed deliveries are not about the space the unit occupies. Overhead is the commonest culprit: branches, cables, a carport roof, a low canopy over a yard entrance. The truck needs clearance to lift and set down, not just to drive past.
After that it is surface. A truck that sinks into soft ground is a recovery job rather than a delivery, and drivers are right to refuse. Then gates, which are measured for the truck rather than the unit, and finally parked cars, which are the one cause you can remove entirely by telling somebody the delivery window.
A failed delivery usually costs a full trip charge for nothing. Two minutes describing the approach on the phone is the cheapest insurance available.
Residential jobs are a different problem
On a job site the constraint is mud and clearance. At a house it is the neighbors, the driveway surface and the fact that somebody has to live beside it for two weeks.
Site it away from windows and away from where anyone eats outdoors, downwind if there is a prevailing one, and on hardstanding rather than lawn, both because turf will not recover and because a service truck needs to reach it. If the unit has to go in the street rather than on private ground, that is a permit question and the answer varies by city.
The neighbor conversation is worth having before delivery rather than after. It costs nothing and it is the difference between two weeks of goodwill and two weeks of complaints.
On a long site, two smaller banks beat one large one. Walking time is the real cost on a job site, and a crew losing ten minutes each way to a single unit costs more in time than the second unit costs to rent.
Work out how many you need before deciding where they go.
Common questions
Where should a porta potty be placed?
Do I need a permit for a porta potty?
What access does the delivery truck need?
Figures on this page come from the Porta Potty Finder. How the data is collected.