Inspecting a gutter? Choose the right scaffold.

Take the slim version of 75 cm wide for this job, the RS51 in the Altrex range. You need little room up there: a torch, your phone, perhaps a screwdriver to test a bracket and a cloth to wipe a joint clean. What you do need is a tower you can move along the wall on your own. Inspecting a gutter you do that six or seven times in a morning, and then every kilo you do not have to push counts towards your pace.

That slim size helps at the side of the house too. The strip between a wall and the boundary is no more than a metre at many houses, and often there is a downpipe, a tap or a row of slabs against it as well. With a build 75 cm wide you get past there without first having to clear half the garden. You would only choose the wide version of 135 cm if you were taking material and tools up for a repair at the same time.

If the gutter is only three to four metres up, over an extension or a garage for instance, a one person build can do the job as well. On an ordinary house with a storey above it that leaves you a metre short and you end up peering upwards anyway. If you are hesitating between the slim and the wide build, put the different mobile scaffolds you can hire side by side and look above all at the openings you meet on the way.

The point that matters is the top rim of the gutter, because you have to see over it. On an ordinary mid terrace house with a storey and a pitched roof that rim hangs at four to six metres. The height you state when you hire is called working height, and it is made up of the height your platform stands at plus roughly 2 metres your arms add to it. For this job that comes out at a reach of 6 to 8 metres.

On an inspection you want to stand a little higher than on most other jobs. If your chest is at gutter rim height you look at it rather than into it, and it is the inside you want to see: the silt in the bend, the stain by a joint, the place where water stands. So choose your build so that your head comes well above the rim and you can look down into the gutter without stretching.

Measure from the spot where the castors will end up, and note that a drive or a garden path can fall away quite a bit. Choose too low and you miss exactly the part of the gutter you wanted to check, and then you had the build brought for nothing. Which build goes with a gutter at five metres you can see on the page about working at 8 metres of working height, including the platform height that belongs to it.

Because a gutter runs the full width of the elevation, you do not put the build in one place but in a series of places. Walk that route once beforehand and look carefully at where the castors will have to run: over slabs, over grass, past a border or over a lip at the garden path. On a path thirty centimetres wide you get nowhere with a mobile scaffold. So make sure the strip along the wall is passable and reasonably level over its whole length before you order anything.

At the front you are often on the pavement or a drive, and then the question is whether you are in the way of cyclists and pedestrians. Keep a walking route free for people on foot and ask the council whether anything has to be arranged in your street. At the back the obstacles are different: a shed, a water butt under the outlet, a low canopy right beneath the gutter. The notes on standing a build on uneven ground help with a garden that is not level.

Think as well about where the four stabiliser legs come out. They stick out at an angle and want a level piece of ground at every stopping point, including halfway along a border. It is a shame to be able to look at the gutter by the outlet but not at the corner, because a raised terrace sits exactly there. So walk the whole elevation and decide in advance at which points you want to stop; that saves you a lot of shoving on the day.

Inspecting is short work. Six or seven stopping points along the elevation, a few minutes of looking at each, some photographs and a note of what is wrong. Without the assembly you are round in a couple of hours. So count on one day of hire for the inspection round, with building up and taking down eating the greater part of your time. Anyone who wants to go all the way round a terraced house, front to back, takes half a day longer in practice.

Even so, booking a single day is not always sensible. If your looking turns up something you want to put right yourself straight away, you want the build to stay standing a while. On top of that the weather can spoil things: in a hard wind or slippery rain you would rather postpone. Booking two days and possibly not using the second is therefore rarely a wrong call, even if your inspection is done in a morning in theory.

That costs little as well. Over the opening twenty four hours you pay the full amount; from every day after it 95 per cent comes off, so that second day hardly registers in your total. You give the start date and the end date you want yourself, and handing back early is always allowed, even if you are done after one morning. What a short period costs for your model you can work out on the page with the rental price per height.

With a platform of 245 cm you check a good two metres of gutter per stopping point. That sounds like little, but for inspecting it works nicely: you take in a manageable length, note what you see and then shuffle on. Start at the outlet, because that is where you notice quickest whether water is standing, and work from there towards the far end of the gutter. That way you keep track of which part you have had and which is still to come.

Watch a few things per length: is there water in the trough, does the gutter sag between two brackets, has a joint come loose, is moss growing in the bend, is there a bracket you can move with a finger. Push gently against the front of the gutter as well to feel whether the whole thing is still firm. This is emphatically looking work: scooping out and flushing through is cleaning, and adjusting brackets belongs to the yearly service.

You move with an empty floor, even if you are only shifting two metres. Take your torch and your phone down with you, leave nothing lying on the rim of the gutter and then wind the stabiliser legs out neatly again at the new spot. If your round shows more is wrong, plan a separate job; repairing a leaking gutter asks for tools, material and above all more days than you have booked for now.

The build comes to you as a set of loose parts that went into the van counted. For a short job that takes some getting used to: you spend more time assembling than looking. That is exactly why it pays to let the delivery fall a day before your inspection day instead of on the morning itself. If your order is in on a working day before 15:00, everything is ready the next working day, and you have the evening before or the early morning to build.

When you reserve you fill in yourself on which date the set arrives and on which date it is collected again. For a gutter inspection in autumn that is handy: you pick a day that is dry and still, and move it if you must. Do bear in mind that a windy day upsets your whole plan, because then you stay below with your notes. A set that reaches eight metres is a manageable build in any case, certainly next to the tall versions.

When you are finished you only have to take it apart and set it out stacked; we come and remove the parts again. Run through the count while you are stacking, because a brace left lying in the hedge would otherwise only show up at our end. That way you know for certain the set you received goes back complete. The charge for bringing and collecting goes with your province, and that overview is with the rates for delivery.

The floor you stand on belongs to load class 3 from EN 1004 and holds two hundred kilos per square metre. On a looking round you get nowhere close to it, since almost nothing goes up with you. It is still useful to know where the limit lies, certainly if halfway through you decide to take a bucket or a tool box up after all. As soon as you move from looking to working, what ends up on that floor changes too.

Put the castors on the brake before you go up, never roll the tower while anyone or anything is still on the floor, and in a stiff wind do not climb at all. That last is no theoretical point on a gutter inspection, because you look in autumn and that is the season of squalls. A day's delay costs you almost nothing on the hire, while a wet, slippery floor at five metres is a risk nothing outweighs.

The particular risk of this job is the leaning. You want to look into the gutter, so you automatically hang over the rail and stretch your neck. Rather set the build a little higher than stretch yourself, and if need be use your phone camera to see into the bend you cannot reach. Keep the ground under you clear as well: a torch that falls lands exactly on the spot where somebody is standing to look up.