Maintaining a roof? Choose the right scaffold.

For a maintenance round along roof and gutter you hire the RS52, the wide Altrex tower with a floor of 135 cm. You choose that width here not for reach but for everything that has to stand beside your feet: a bucket for the leaf waste, a second bucket of clean water, your sealant gun and a box of brackets with screws. Working in pairs, one can scoop while the other tightens the next bracket, without either of you stepping over the other kit.

The floor measures 245 cm along its length, exactly the stretch of gutter edge you take on per position. For maintenance that works out well: you start on the left, empty the gutter across to the right, check the bottom row of tiles and only then go down to move. Everything you still need halfway through stands beside your feet instead of ten metres below. Which sizes are otherwise in the fleet you can see on the page with mobile scaffolds available to hire.

The slim RS51 at 75 cm is only worth weighing up here when a gate or a path along the boundary will not pass the wide version. You then give up floor that this job actually uses. The MiTower drops out because it goes to 6.2 metres of working height and a roof edge on two storeys sits higher, and the RS44 room scaffold is meant purely for indoor work up to about four metres.

The highest point on a maintenance round is almost never the ridge. You need the gutter edge, the brackets beneath it, the fascia board behind it and the bottom two rows of tiles you can still reach from that edge. On a house with two storeys that gives you 8 to 12 metres of working height. Where a dormer or an extension carries its own gutter lower down the surface, measure that separately, because you set the tower up in a different build there.

With a mobile scaffold you add about 2 metres of reach to the platform height, the distance between your feet and the point your hand still gets to comfortably. For this job that means a platform somewhere between 6 and 10 metres. Choose your height so the gutter edge ends up around your waist, because then you can look into it and work in it without hauling yourself up. The page on a working height of 10 metres shows the matching build.

Hiring too tight bites harder on maintenance, because here you are not finishing a surface but looking into a gutter. Stand half a metre too low and you reach over the edge without seeing the bottom, which is exactly where the leaves and the silt you came for are lying. Start your measurement at the bottom as well, precisely where the wheels will end up, because a sloping drive or a sunken terrace costs you half a storey.

Unlike facade work, roof maintenance puts you on all four sides of the house, because the gutter runs everywhere. One time that is the pavement on the street side, then the drive beside the garage, then the grass at the back and finally the narrow path along the boundary. Walk that route once with a tape measure first, because the side you skip is usually the side where a shed, a hedge or a canopy stands against the wall.

Under the wheels you want level and load bearing. Slabs, bricks and a compacted gravel path can take it; a border that sinks after a shower cannot. Allow extra room around the foot for the four stabilisers that splay outwards, and keep that zone clear of the buckets and sacks you collect the gutter waste in. How to deal with a sloping or uneven stretch is set out in ground that does not lie level.

Measure the openings on your route as well. A wide tower you build in the front garden also has to get round the back, or you build it a second time. If a position ends up partly on the pavement, keep a way through for pedestrians and warn the neighbours if you come out above their fence. On this job leaves, moss and sometimes a piece of old sealant simply come down, and you do not want that on a parked car.

Per position, scooping, rinsing, tightening and checking easily take you an hour or an hour and a half, and an average detached house asks for four to eight positions. Add the building and dismantling of each build, plus wheeling it along and levelling it again. All told that gives a realistic rental period of three to five days for a complete round. Do only the front and the back and leave the sides this season, and you manage in two days.

Those days hold waiting moments you cannot plan away. Sealant and repair compound have to cure before you can rinse over them, a wet gutter empties worse than a dried out one, and in hard wind or slippery frost the day simply does not happen. This work is mostly done in autumn, exactly the period when a lost day is the rule rather than the exception. So reckon with the day you are certainly finished, not the day it might be done.

Booking generously costs little on this hire. The full rate applies only to the first 24 hours; every day after that comes with a discount of 95 per cent, so a spare day for bad weather barely weighs. Book too tight and you are halfway round with the van already pulling up to collect the tower. How to size such a period for a job made of many separate pieces is explained in the number of days you need a scaffold.

From a floor of 245 cm you handle slightly less than two and a half metres of gutter length per position. Keep a fixed order: scoop the coarse leaves into the bucket first, then rinse or wipe the bottom, then along the brackets and the fascia board, and only last the tiles above your head. That way you look up once and you know at every position that nothing has been skipped along the way.

Make sure everything you need goes up in one go, because climbing down for a forgotten screw costs more time at this height than the work itself. A bucket with a lid, a scoop, a hand brush, sealant with a gun, a few spare brackets and your phone for photographs of what you cannot fix yourself. Put that bucket in the middle of the floor and not against the guard rail, because reaching over to the gutter is exactly when you knock it off.

What people misjudge on roof maintenance is the number of moves. Twelve metres of elevation sounds like nothing, but that is already five positions, and you still have three other sides of the house to go. Reckon on extra builds at a dormer, an extension or a corner where two gutters meet. If the gutter itself is full of silt and growth it becomes a longer job, as with cleaning out a roof gutter. If it is a flat surface with seams and bonded edges, that belongs with roof covering maintenance.

The mobile scaffold reaches you as a complete, counted set of loose parts. Nominate a spot for that stack beforehand, well clear of the strip under the roof edge where your buckets and waste sack are going to stand. The drive, a corner of the lawn or a piece of terrace works better. Book on a working day and stay ahead of 15:00, and the set is with you on the following working day, so the first position can start the morning after.

Building it is down to your own effort, with the enclosed manual and an instruction video that shows you the order. For a build of this height two people need half a day, so plan the delivery a day before your first maintenance day. You pick the delivery date and the collection date yourself, and on this job you let that choice follow the weather: assembling in a lashing autumn shower gets you nowhere at all.

After your last position you take the scaffold apart and set it out complete, after which we come and fetch it. Count the parts while you dismantle, because on a round about the house a coupling ends up in a hedge or behind a shed easily enough. Do not put that dismantling on the afternoon you are still working, or you will be rushing in the dark. The cost of the run out and back within your own province sits with the delivery rates per province.

Under EN 1004 this floor falls in load class 3, so every square metre of it may take 200 kg. On maintenance you get closer to that than you would think: two people, a bucket filling with wet leaves and silt, a tool box and a jerrycan of water add up faster than on painting work. Spread that weight over the floor instead of putting it all in one corner by the access hatch, and empty the bucket in between.

The fixed rules apply here in full. The moment anybody steps on, the wheels go on the brake, you never wheel the build with a person or tools on it, and in hard gusts you stop work. You reach that wind limit sooner in autumn than in spring, and autumn is precisely the season this work is usually planned for. Walk round the four stabilisers again after every move before the first person climbs back up.

The risks that belong to a maintenance round sit both above you and below you. Out of the gutter comes wet leaf litter and silt that makes your platform treacherous, so sweep it off as soon as it starts sliding under your soles. A tool that slips from your hand while you reach over lands ten metres below in the garden, so keep that zone empty and let no children or pets play there. The remaining rules are in working safely at height.