Pallets do not mind the cold. Dry hardwood at ten degrees behaves almost exactly like dry hardwood at thirty. What ruins a winter pool is the cycle: wet, frozen, thawed, handled, wet again — repeated for four months.
The freeze-thaw mechanism
Water that has soaked into a deck board expands when it freezes. On its own that does little; the damage happens at the fastener. Ice expansion works the nail shank loose in its hole, and when the board thaws, the grip does not come back. A pool that has been through a dozen cycles feels sloppy even though nothing is visibly broken.
Frozen stacks are also genuinely dangerous to handle. Pallets freeze to each other and to the ground, and the instinct is to force them apart with the forks, which strips bottom deck boards wholesale.
Mould, and the food-industry consequence
A tarped stack is worse than an uncovered one if the tarp traps moisture. Mould needs wood above roughly 20% moisture content and a bit of warmth; a sealed tarp in weak winter sun supplies both. For anybody shipping food, that is not a strength problem but a contamination problem, and it is the usual reason a load gets rejected at a grocery dock in February.
- Never store directly on ground. Two sacrificial pallets underneath costs nothing.
- Cover from above with air movement at the sides, not sealed in plastic.
- Let frozen stacks thaw before separating them, even when the schedule disagrees.
- Pull from covered stock for anything food-bound between November and March.
- Expect a downgrade on anything stored uncovered through a wet January — and price it honestly.
What we do differently in winter
The grading line slows down, deliberately. Moisture checks go from weekly samples to daily on anything heading to food or pharmaceutical customers. We dispatch exclusively from covered bays for those lanes, and we will tell a customer to wait two days rather than send a damp load that will be rejected on arrival.
If you only change one thing
Get your own stacks off the ground and under something. Roofing our grading bays in 2015 cut our downgrade rate by nearly a fifth, and it is the single highest-return thing a site with an outdoor pallet area can do before the first hard freeze.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on November 14, 2023. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- November 14, 2023
- Category
- Seasonal
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Winter in a pallet yard: moisture, mould and frozen cores”, Repallet Shop, November 14, 2023. repalletshop.com/blog/winter-in-a-pallet-yard