Every season a fresh batch of kit joins the hire fleet at DB Entertainment, and the newest additions tend to be the things people haven't seen at a school fair, a street party or an exhibition stand before. We've been adding to the range at the Rotherham warehouse since 1999, and there are now more than 600 products across 68 categories. These are the recent arrivals that get the most questions when they roll out of the van, what they cost, and where they don't fit.
The AI photo booth
The AI photo booth photographs your guests and then builds a new AI-generated image around them - company mascots, branded scenes, historical settings, whatever the event calls for - drawn from more than 180 preset templates or a custom scene configured to your brief. It starts from £695 plus VAT, comes delivered, set up and collected by our own team, and guests pull their photos down by QR code as many times as they like during the hire. It's one of five photo booths in the fleet, as it goes, and the only one that invents the background from scratch.
Spider Mountain
For outdoor events the Spider Mountain is the big climbing option. It stands 9m (30ft) tall on a 15m by 20m footprint, and up to 16 people climb at once through crisscrossed elastic scramble levels before dropping back down the freefall slide at the summit. Throughput is around 225 climbers an hour, the highest of any climbing activity in our fleet, which on a busy school fun day is the difference between one go each and half the queue wandering off. Children as young as three and adults can climb the same structure at the same time, trained supervising staff are included for the booked period, and it powers itself off its own unit so it works on fields with no mains supply.
Football darts with a penalty shootout attached
The Football Darts Combi with Penalty Shootout is two games in one unit. The headline is the giant velcro dartboard, an octagonal board a shade under 4m tall with real dartboard scoring - kick a sticky ball and score wherever it lands. Alongside it sits the penalty half: a printed goalmouth with a diving keeper and seven numbered holes, where the top corner pays 40 and the ball rolls back out of the bottom so nobody spends the afternoon retrieving it. Each player gets three velcro footballs, a hoop on a pole keeps retrieval quick between turns, and the whole thing hires from £199.
Quieter power for the rest of the fleet
Not every new arrival is a game. The Instagrid ONE max is a 2.1kWh lithium battery power station delivering 3600W of silent 230V power with no engine, no fuel and no exhaust, so it can sit indoors right next to whatever it's running. It weighs around 20kg, recharges in about two and a half hours from empty, and covers PA rigs, lighting, exhibition stand power and camera kit on filming locations. It slots into the generator and safety equipment range alongside the diesel sets we still hire for bigger jobs, and we'll tell you which side of that line your event falls on before you book.
Why we keep buying new kit
95% of the equipment we hire out is owned by us, and the fleet has been renewed steadily for years, with five-figure investment rounds documented back to 2017. Owning the stock is what lets us maintain everything to one standard, turn up with our own vans and drivers, and put a machine like the AI booth on the road before other hire companies in the region have one. Every inflatable is inspected annually by independent testers, you get the risk assessment and method statement in your inbox before the day, and every hire carries £5m of public liability cover as standard.
Where the new kit won't go
A few limits are worth knowing before you enquire. Spider Mountain wants flat trailer access and a 15m by 20m patch, so it isn't a back-garden job. The football darts unit stands 12.5ft tall and needs around 20ft of headroom, which rules out most village halls with a low ceiling, though it plays happily indoors on hard floors where the height allows. The AI photo booth needs a power socket and a level spot roughly the size of a small desk, and there can be a minimum spend depending on your location. If any of those constraints is a problem, ask - there's usually something else in the fleet that fits the same space.
Have a go
Everything above works just as well at a do in Sheffield or Doncaster as somewhere further afield, and we cover the rest of the UK for larger bookings. If one of the recent additions suits something you're planning, give the office a ring on 0114 345 0135 and we'll talk through space, power and access before you commit to anything.
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