Calculating working height

Start at the work point, not at the facade

Most people start by asking how tall their house is. That is exactly the wrong number. What counts is the highest point your hands need to reach: the top of the gutter, the upper edge of a window frame, the underside of a dormer or the row of tiles where the moss sits. Everything above that point is irrelevant to the calculation, even if the roof carries on for several metres.

That often makes metres of difference. On a terraced house with a pitched roof the ridge sits a good deal higher than the gutter, while the work happens at the gutter. Take the ridge as your starting point and you hire a scaffold two or three sizes too tall: more expensive, heavier to build and more awkward to move. So look at the job first and at the building second.

If you have several work points at different heights, take the highest one. Painting the facade including the fascia boards means the fascia decides the size, not the first floor windows. You still reach the lower parts from a tall platform by setting the scaffold one frame lower part way through, or by doing the bottom stretch from the ground.

The rule in one sentence

Working height is the height up to which you can work, and it is made up of the platform height plus 2 metres of reach. For your calculation that means the working height you need equals the height of your highest work point. If the gutter sits at 6 metres, you need 6 metres of working height, and you will be standing on a platform at roughly 4 metres.

So you do not add the 2 metres yourself. That is the mistake made most often: measuring the work point, adding another 2 metres and then hiring a scaffold a full size too big. The reach is already baked into the figure we and the rest of the trade work with. What those two figures mean exactly is set out under platform height and working height.

Use the sum in reverse to check whether you will be standing comfortably. Subtract 2 metres from the working height and you know where your feet will end up. If that deck sits well below your work point, you will be working above your head all day. If it sits just below it, you work at chest height and you keep that up far longer.

How to judge the height without measuring to the top

A tape measure rarely reaches 6 metres, and hanging off a ladder to measure is precisely what you want to avoid. So work with references you can measure. A door, a window or a floor level whose height you know serves as a measuring stick on a photo of the facade. Count how many times that reference fits into the facade up to your work point and you are seldom more than half a metre out.

If you prefer to think in storeys, skip the measuring entirely. The floor pages translate a storey into a working height, from the ground floor up to the fifth. Working on the gutter above the first floor means you can see straight away which sizes fit and which models are available.

If you are still stuck, take a photo from across the street showing the whole facade including the front door. Send it through WhatsApp and say what you are going to do. Using the door as a reference we will judge the height with you and name the size we would take ourselves.

Worked example: working on the gutter

Say you are replacing the gutter and the top of that gutter sits at 6 metres. The calculation then runs in four steps, from the work point to the size you click in the configurator.

• Highest work point, the top of the gutter: 6 metres.
• Required working height: also 6 metres, because the 2 metres of reach are already included in that figure.
• Next available size in the range: 6.2 metres working height.
• Matching platform height: 4.2 metres, so you stand well below the gutter and work at chest height.
• Model: at this height everything is still open to you, from the narrow RS51 to the wide RS52.

From work point to the size you order

The table below runs those four steps for a series of common work points. Read the row closest to your measurement and always round up. If your work point is below 4 metres and you are working indoors, the room scaffold is often the better choice than the lowest mobile scaffold.

What to do when you land between two sizes

The range moves in steps of one metre, from 4.2 to 14.2 metres working height. If your sum comes out at 7.4 metres, that size does not exist and you take 8.2 metres. Rounding up is almost always right: standing too high is solved by working slightly bent or by setting the deck one frame lower during assembly, while standing too low cannot be solved at all.

There is a cost argument pointing the same way. One size up makes little difference to the day rate, while a second hire because you could not reach your work point costs you a whole day and another delivery. What a size more or less means is visible straight away in the configurator and on the working height overview.

If you want to sanity check the size you picked, click through to the page for that height. At 6 metres working height, for instance, you can see which models are available and what sort of work that height is normally used for, so you can verify your own calculation.

The ground decides your starting point

You measure from the spot where the wheels will stand, not from the pavement or from ground level. In a sloping garden, on a raised terrace or beside a basement with a sunken entrance that easily accounts for half a metre to a full metre. Write that height down beforehand, because during assembly there is no way around it.

If the scaffold stands on soft or uneven ground the sum does not change, but the preparation does. Base plates spread the load and keep the tower level, and standing level is a condition before you go up at all. What you need for that is covered in the guide on a mobile scaffold on uneven ground.

Watch what sits between the scaffold and the facade as well. An extension, a conservatory, a sloping cellar entrance or a border full of shrubs pushes the tower backwards, and the further you stand from the facade, the less far you effectively reach upwards. So measure the distance to the facade alongside the height, and bear in mind that an obstacle sometimes means one size more than the sum suggests.

• Sloping garden: measure at the lowest side, because that is where the wheels end up furthest from your work point.
• Raised terrace or kerb: you start higher, so you often need one size less than you thought.
• Sunken entrance or light well: never a wheel over the edge, measure from the solid ground beside it.
• Garden path with a threshold or step: place the scaffold entirely on one side of that transition.
• Gravel, grass or sand: count on base plates and measure from the level those will sit at.

Sideways reach does not count in the calculation

The 2 metres of reach apply straight up. Reaching sideways costs you stability and is not part of the sizing: both feet stay on the platform and your body stays inside the guardrails. Across the width you therefore only finish the strip of facade directly in front of you, and on the RS51 and the RS52 that strip is the size of the 245 cm platform.

For a wide facade that means moving, not stretching. You climb down, shift the scaffold one platform length along, check again that everything is level and climb back up. Count those moves into your planning: on a facade ten metres wide you are up and down four to five times, whatever height you chose.

The width of the model changes none of that, but it does change how much you can take up with you each time. The narrow 75 cm of the RS51 and the wide 135 cm of the RS52 are listed with every other measurement in the overview of dimensions and sizes, useful if you want to know in advance how often you will be shifting the tower.

Indoors the calculation runs the other way

Outdoors your work point sets the size; indoors the ceiling sets the size. Your reach is rarely the problem there; the question is whether the scaffold, guardrails and all, fits under the ceiling. So measure the clear height from floor to ceiling, allow for beams and light fittings, and work back to the platform height that still stays underneath.

The RS44 room scaffold exists for rooms, hallways and stairwells. It reaches 3 or 4 metres working height and fits through a standard interior door from about 70 cm, so you roll it fully assembled from one space to the next. In a void or a tall hall it runs out of height and you look at the narrow RS51 instead, provided it can get through assembled.

A stairwell is the trickiest case, because the ground runs away underneath the scaffold. Measure the height you need from the tread the base actually stands on, which is rarely the floor you walked in on. Work that situation out twice rather than once, and measure the clear passage at the turn of the stairs as well. Otherwise the scaffold ends up filling the hallway with nowhere left to pass.

What the calculation gives you on common jobs

The work point shifts with the type of work, even on the same facade. The examples below show where to aim your tape measure per job, so you do not automatically reach for the tallest size.

• Cleaning windows: the highest window, and then the top edge of the frame, not the roof edge above it.
• Fitting solar panels: the row of tiles where the hooks go, usually well below the ridge.
• A dormer: the top of the dormer roof, because you need to see just over it.
• Painting a facade: the highest fascia boards or the highest frame, depending on how far you go.
• Repointing or facade cleaning: the top joint you still intend to tackle, so usually just below the gutter.

When your calculation falls outside the range

If you come out below 4 metres and you are working outdoors, the lowest mobile scaffold at 4.2 metres is fine, but look at the MiTower too. That one-person scaffold reaches roughly 6 metres working height, goes up quickly and fits where an ordinary tower is just too bulky. For indoor work below 4 metres the room scaffold remains the logical choice.

If you come out above 14.2 metres, a mobile scaffold stops being the answer. That is the upper limit of what we hire out. In that case a different type of equipment is called for, and the trade off is described in the comparison of a mobile scaffold and a cherry picker. Call or message us before you order anything and we will think along about what is possible.

If you land exactly on the 14.2 metre limit, look critically at your work point once more. Very often the ridge turns out to have been counted while the work sits at the gutter, which brings you back inside the range after all. That is the cheapest correction available to you.

Let the configurator do the arithmetic

If you would rather not calculate, enter the type of job and how high you need to reach in the configurator. You get the matching working height and the available models, with the total for your hire period alongside. The first hire day is a full day and every following day is charged at 5 percent of that day rate, so planning an extra day is rarely a problem. The breakdown is on the page about the day rate for a mobile scaffold.

Order before 15:00 and the scaffold is at your door the next working day, anywhere in the Netherlands. Delivery and collection are one fixed amount per province, shown under delivery costs. Collecting it yourself is free by appointment at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam; either way you assemble the scaffold yourself using the manual and the instruction video.

If you are still torn between two sizes after doing the sums, put it to us through the contact page. A photo and a short description of the job are enough. Better one size too generous than a day lost because you just could not reach your work point.