The prohibited list every legitimate facility enforces, the items that are legal but ruined by desert heat, the residual-moisture rule, and the honest difference between a climate-controlled vault and a metal box in the sun.
Quick answer: Ontrack Moving® runs storage warehouses in Hayward, California and Peoria, Arizona, and as of August 2026 the prohibited list is the same at both, and at every legitimate facility in the country: no gasoline, propane, or any fuel, no aerosols, paint, or chemicals, no ammunition or fireworks, no perishable food, no plants, and nothing alive, damp, or leaking.
The banned list is the easy part. The expensive mistakes are legal: candles, vinyl records, photographs, electronics, and lithium batteries riding out a Phoenix summer in a sealed metal container. Shaded air in the Valley runs 110 to 118 degrees; the inside of a closed steel box in direct sun runs well hotter than that.
What belongs in storage and how it is stored: see our managed vault storage page. For how many vaults your home actually needs, the math lives in our 26-foot truck and vault capacity guide.
This list is not company policy or preference. It is fire code, federal carrier regulation, and pest control, which is why it reads the same at a professional warehouse, a self-storage facility, and a portable container company. If a facility tells you it will look the other way on any of these, it is telling you what else it looks the other way on.
Where do the banned items go instead? Use them up, hand them to a neighbor, or take them to a household hazardous waste drop-off. For furniture and junk that is not worth storing at all, a single-item junk haul is usually cheaper than twelve months of storing something you were never going to take back out. Our room-by-room packing guide covers the same non-allowables from the moving-truck side, where federal carrier rules apply before the warehouse rules ever do.
Nothing below is prohibited. All of it has come out of somebody's unconditioned container looking worse than it went in, and in Arizona the process takes one summer, not one decade. A sealed metal box in direct desert sun runs far above the 110 to 118 degree shade readings Phoenix posts in July, commonly 30 degrees or more above ambient. Here is what that does, item by item:
| Item | What sustained heat does to it |
| Candles, crayons, lipstick | Wax softens near 100 degrees and slumps against whatever it touches. It does not re-harden into a candle. |
| Vinyl records | Warp. A stack of warped records is a stack of coasters. |
| Photographs and film | Prints stick face-to-face and fuse. Negatives curl. This one is permanent; no valuation rate brings a photograph back. |
| Electronics and TVs | Heat cycling stresses solder joints, adhesives, and screens. The TV that worked in May powers on strangely in October. |
| Lithium batteries | Capacity degrades in sustained heat; a damaged cell venting inside a packed box is the failure case fire marshals write about. Carry devices and spare batteries with you. |
| Wine | Cooks. Sustained temperatures above the mid-70s flatten it; a container summer finishes the job. Aroma comes out, cork pushes up. |
| Leather and upholstery | Dries and cracks in heat; mildews if stored with any dampness in the cushions. |
| Pressboard and veneer furniture | Glue joints let go, veneer lifts. Solid wood survives what particle board does not. |
| Pianos and instruments | Soundboards, glue joints, and tuning react to heat and dryness. A piano is exactly the item that earns climate control. See piano moving. |
| Artwork on canvas | Canvas slackens and tightens with temperature swings; varnish can bloom. Crate it, and store it conditioned. |
We run both climates, so this comparison is our daily operating reality, not theory. In Peoria, Arizona, our warehouse is fully climate controlled, because everything on the table above is what happens when it is not. In Hayward, California, the mild coastal air does the moderating for free, and the warehouse runs 22-foot ceilings with a secure, high-fence vehicle yard on Clawiter Road for cars, boats, trailers, and RVs.
Inside both buildings, belongings ride in 7x7x5 wood vaults, and the material choice is deliberate: wood breathes, so furniture does not sweat the way it does against steel walls when the temperature swings. Items go in blanket-wrapped, logged on an inventory manifest, and come back out by vault number. A portable metal container parked in a yard offers none of that, and for a short window in a mild climate with a non-sensitive load, it can still be fine. For a Phoenix summer, or for anything on the heat-sensitive list, it is the wrong box. Ontrack Moving covers the details, and current vault rates, on the storage page, and our Arizona heat protocol guide explains how the same thinking applies to the truck ride itself.
Mildew does not need much. It needs closed, dark, damp, and time. A storage vault supplies closed and dark; do not supply the other two. The usual offenders are things that seem dry:
The last category is not about facility rules. It is about what storage liability actually is. Stored belongings, like transported ones, ride under standard cargo liability of $0.60 per pound per article, the federal FMCSA minimum, with additional valuation protection available for purchase. Run that math on a 5-pound laptop and you get $3.00. So regardless of what any facility allows, these travel in your car, not in a vault or container:
The pre-storage walkthrough takes ten minutes and settles everything on this page. Before load day, walk your garage and kitchen with three piles in mind: hazardous (dispose properly), heat-sensitive or irreplaceable (rides with you or goes climate-controlled), and everything else (vault it). Crews check for the obvious items at pickup, propane tanks and gas cans get caught at the door, but the pantry box taped shut in June is the one that finds us in August. Sort it once, at home, with the lights on.
Staffed warehouses in Hayward, CA and climate-controlled Peoria, AZ. One carrier from your doorway to the vault and back, USDOT #2551548.
or call (888) 914-8787
