How or where can you find churches or organizations looking to get rid of daycare equipment for free or really cheap?
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If you intend to start a baby/child day care business, cheap or free equipment is definitely not a good start. The equipment you provide must pass all safety requirements and free or cheap equipment may not meet the required standards in your area. The equipment may be too old, designed incorrectly, etc., and may be cheap or free because of this.
I can assure you that an injury or worse involving a child using unsafe equipment will be costly. Your insurance company (your business plan does include insurance?) may refuse to pay for an injury occurring on unsafe equipment. If you do not have the funds or financial backing to buy equipment that meets all safety standards in your area, you must reassess your entire business plan.
If a church or charity doesn't want it, you don't either. Churches and other non-profits use this equipment themselves and since they are often on shoestring budgets their own equipment desperately needs an upgrade. Anything they can no longer use will be falling apart.
Dinah is right about insurance. You need to keep up with product recalls. If anything happens, insurance will not pay out if your equipment is discovered to be on a recall list or not up to recent safety standards. They may just decline to cover you at all.
For instance, in 2011 new safety standards were released for cribs. Any cribs that were not up to those standards became immediately illegal to buy or sell. Many people ignore those laws or just don't know about them, but insurance won't let you off the hook for that.
You can buy gently used equipment, but do a google search for a product recall before you buy, and check for recent safety standards for that category of product and how recently those standards were updated. If the item is older than the standards upgrade, don't buy.
I regularly see nice articles given or thrown away at clothing drops and yard sales and I feel awful that they go to the dumps! Try free ads in Craig's list and local papers and an ad on community bulletin boards and possibly your local library.
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