Maintaining a gutter? Choose the right scaffold.

For the gutter service the slim build of 75 cm is the practical choice, the RS51 at Altrex. You need no workbench up there, but you do need somewhere for the bucket, a hand scoop, a brush and the end of the garden hose. All of that fits easily on a slim floor of 75 cm. More important is that you can roll it on your own, because on this job you are shifting all day. A heavy build that only moves with two people makes the work needlessly slow.

There is another reason to stay slim. Along the wall at most houses lie borders, tiled paths and sometimes a strip of gravel less than a metre across. At 75 cm wide you drive between all of that without first flattening the planting. Take the wide build of 135 cm and you are levering it round every corner, and on the back half of the elevation you may not get through at all, while that is precisely where a gutter fills up soonest.

Wider only becomes interesting when the maintenance runs on into replacement or into painting, because then boards, paint or new gutter sections go up with you and you suddenly do need a work surface. If it stays at scooping out and flushing through, you are dragging those extra frames through the garden for nothing. To see the builds beside one another before you commit, look at the mobile scaffolds available to hire and pay attention above all to the width of your garden path.

What decides the height here is not the roof edge but the bottom of the trough, because you have to get your hand into it. At a terraced house with one storey the gutter hangs somewhere between four and six metres. What you fill in when you hire a mobile scaffold is called the working height: take the height of your floor and add the 2 metres or so your arms still cover. For this job that comes to a reach of 6 to 8 metres.

Set your stand so that your floor comes just under the gutter and you look comfortably over it. Stay too low and you scoop with your arms stretched above your head, and everything you lift out lands on your face. Stand too high and you stoop over the rim all day. You only notice that difference after an hour of scraping, and by then it is awkward to correct, because you would have to take the build apart for it.

Begin your measurement at the ground the castors will rest on. A back garden that falls towards the fence, or a raised terrace, changes your starting point by half a metre without you noticing until you are up there. If you pass a dormer or a projecting bay on the way, add a little in advance. On the page about a reach of 8 metres you see which builds belong to it and what floor height you get.

Unlike a repair you are not standing in one place here but at ten or twelve places in a row, spread over the whole elevation. So the requirement is not that there is a flat patch somewhere, but that the entire strip along the house is passable from end to end. Walk it once beforehand with a bucket in your hand: can you roll there, do the castors stand steady everywhere, is there a lip or a step you cannot get over?

Grass deserves attention on this job. Maintenance is usually autumn work and the garden is wet then; a lawn that still looked firm in September is soft by November. Lay slabs or boards down at the places where you stay a while, and check at every stopping point again that the stabiliser legs stand firmly enough before the first person climbs up. How you solve that on soft or sloping ground is explained under working on uneven ground.

Think about the water as well. When you flush through, a fair amount comes out of the outlet or, if there is a blockage, over the rim and down. So do not put your build right above a terrace full of garden furniture, and take the neighbours into account where the boundary sits close to the wall. Make sure too that the garden hose does not run under a castor or over a stabiliser leg, because you will trip over it at the fifth stopping point.

Count on two to three days of hire for this job. The scooping itself goes quickly, but more comes with each stopping point than you expect: first the coarse material out, then the bottom clean, then flushing, then checking whether it drains and if not, prising the outlet free. Do that ten or twelve times along an elevation and your first day is gone. Want the front and the back of the house, and you are certainly into a second day, plus the assembly time.

There are waiting moments in it as well. A blocked rainwater pipe does not always come free in five minutes, and a bracket you want to reset sometimes calls for a screw or a plug you turn out not to have in the house. The weather plays its part too, since this is autumn work and an afternoon of hard wind or steady rain simply comes off your plan. Book a single day and you spend the back elevation watching the clock instead of the gutter.

For your reservation that means: choose the period on the generous side rather than to the minute. You fix the start and end dates yourself and you may always hand the tower back early, so planning an extra day costs you no more than some arithmetic at the kitchen table. How the rates work per model and per height you can check on the page listing every rental price before you settle on a date.

A floor 245 cm long puts a good two metres of gutter in reach at each stopping point. Finish that length completely before you shift on: coarse material into the bucket, scrape the bottom after, rinse with the hose and check that the water runs off the right way. Work from the far end towards the outlet, then everything you loosen goes that way of its own accord and you do not pass the same stretch twice.

Here lies the difference from plain cleaning. On a cleaning round you empty the gutter and you are done; on maintenance you then go along every bracket, every end stop and every joint as well, with a bucket of wet leaves and a hose on your floor. That makes shifting more awkward, because those things have to come down first. So empty the bucket at every move, even when it is not yet full, and reel in a length of hose before you release the castors.

Go along the fixings while you flush, because that is where you see the first problems coming. A bracket that gives, a screw working its way out or a length of gutter visibly sagging belongs in your notes. Tightening a bracket a little you can do on the spot, but if the gutter really hangs crooked that is a separate job with its own material and its own days. For repairing a leaking gutter you book other days and sometimes a wider build.

The build arrives as a set of loose parts that was counted before it left. Decide beforehand where those parts may lie: on the drive, in the front garden or just behind the gate, but in any case not on the strip you will be rolling the castors along. On working days 15:00 counts as the last order time; everything that comes in before that we deliver to your home the next working day. For autumn work that is pleasant, because you can still jump onto a dry week fairly late.

The day of arrival and the day everything goes away again you choose yourself. Let the set land the day before you actually start, so the build already stands and your morning begins up in the gutter rather than down among frames. If a storm is in the forecast, move that date a few days rather than working on at half strength; a gutter service is not going anywhere, and the tower stands just as well next week.

After the last stopping point you take the build apart and set the parts stacked somewhere the van can reach, after which we remove them again. Rinse the deck boards off before you stack, because wet leaves and mud dry rock hard otherwise. Run through the count while stacking, so you can be sure the whole set travels back. Which amount applies for bringing and collecting in your own province you can read with the cost of delivery.

A floor in load class 3 of EN 1004 may be loaded with two hundred kilos per square metre. Maintaining a gutter you will not reach that, not even with a full bucket of wet leaves along. It is still worth knowing, because on this job people sometimes take a second person and a tool box up with them. Stay inside that limit and you have plenty in hand; the real risk on this work lies somewhere else.

Namely in the water. A floor you are standing on with a hose becomes slippery, certainly with mud underneath. So sweep the deck clean now and then and watch your soles when you get on the ladder. The fixed rules stay in place as well: brake the castors before you climb, never roll the build with things or people on it, and do not come up in a hard wind, which in autumn happens more often than you would like.

Finally, watch what goes down. A bucket you lower on a line is fine, a bucket you empty from five metres up is not: wet leaves arrive with some force and from above you cannot see who is walking below. Keep the strip under the build clear and agree that clearly with anyone else busy in the garden. Send a warning down before anything drops, and never let a passer by walk under the tower. More rules are set out under working safely at height.