Installing facade insulation? Choose the right scaffold.

For the preparation on a house of two storeys the choice points at the Altrex RS51, a tower that manages on 75 cm across the width. In this phase you hang about nowhere for long but walk the whole elevation, so you reposition far more often than during the execution. A narrow tower you wheel round a corner, past a downpipe and through a gate on your own, without emptying the garden path. All the available models stand beside one another on the hire page with mobile scaffolds.

What goes up in this phase weighs nothing: a tape, a moisture meter, some line chalk, a brush to open up test patches and a pad to write your dimensions on. You need no wide deck for that. The length of 245 cm counts for more here, because it says how many running metres of elevation you measure and mark out per position. Fewer positions means a shorter measuring round and therefore a shorter period of hire.

The wide RS52 of 135 cm only becomes interesting when preparation and execution fall inside the same rental period and the two of you want to stand up there together. If your route to the rear elevation runs along a narrow path, that width simply will not go through. Setting, bonding and plugging the boards themselves get their own explanation on the page about applying facade insulation; this page is about everything that comes before it.

Your highest point lies at the top edge of the future insulated face, where the closing profile will come under the overhang or just below the gutter. Measure towards that point and not to the ridge above it, because every metre you reserve too much means frames you have to lift up yourself. Two storeys bring you out at a reach of 6 to 8 metres, which is the figure you fix your build with. If you are in doubt, take the roomier build.

Keep the difference between your deck and your reach clearly apart. The deck will hang between four and six metres; what you pick up above it is roughly 2 metres of reach, because even while measuring you stretch an arm along the top edge. Note this too: as a model the RS51 runs to 14.2 metres, but that is what the structure takes, not what turns up on your plot. For this elevation you order a low build on purpose, drawn out at seven metres of working height.

Choose too tight and you miss exactly the band where most of the questions sit. The junction with the overhang, the projection of existing sills and the spot where the roof edge has to be extended together settle your materials list. If you cannot get to it you guess those dimensions from the grass, and that shows up later in a second order costing a day. Start your measurement at wheel level as well, because a driveway that falls away shifts your zero point by half a metre.

Here is where this differs from almost every other job at an elevation. Normally you push the tower as tight against the brickwork as it will go, but with insulation work that wall grows towards you while you stand next to it. Add up the board thickness, the adhesive bed, the reinforcement and the finish, and keep that dimension plus a workable hand's width open between your uprights and the wall. Set it at that distance straight away and no position has to be lined up again later.

Vetting the ground belongs to the work at this stage just as much. Walk the strip along the wall and watch for slabs that rock, the edge where a border begins and hollows where water stands after rain. All four stabilisers splay outwards and each of them wants to land on firm ground, including on the spot where pallets will shortly lie. If the ground does not run level, the article on anchoring and stabilising offers a workable answer.

Finally, walk round the obstacles you only notice once they are in the way. Think of an outside tap, a gas meter box, a shed door that opens outwards or a grating no foot may rest on. Note per side of the house where the tower can and cannot come, because that settles the order in which you tackle the elevations. You would rather decide that order now than on the morning the lorry with boards pulls up.

Measuring and judging two elevations takes about a day with two of you; bringing in the material and putting it away asks another half. Even so, almost nobody reserves a separate period for it. You simply leave the tower standing and carry on into the execution, because building twice and two runs of the van cost more than the days that would sit between. So work from one continuous booking that starts on your measuring day and ends only after the finish coat.

The preparation has its waiting moments too, only of another kind. An elevation that has just been rained on must dry out before you can judge the bond, and the board delivery arrives on the date the supplier names rather than the date that suits you. If it freezes, setting out the base profile shifts anyway. So count your rental days from the moment the tower is standing up to and including the morning you take it apart.

The way the rental price is built up makes generous planning cheap. Only the opening period of 24 hours is charged at the whole amount; on every day you stick behind it, 95 per cent of that rate falls away. A couple of spare days behind your measuring week cost you next to nothing. Reserve too tightly and you watch the van come for the tower with an incomplete list of dimensions, and the building starts afresh weeks later. The article on estimating rental days helps you sharpen it.

Per position you look at 245 cm of elevation, and in the preparation you finish that strip completely before you move on. Tap the brickwork for hollow spots, measure the projection of frames and sills, check whether anchors from old cladding are still in there and write down per strip what has to come out. Whatever you skip now you meet again with a board under your arm and adhesive already pulling, and then that position is lost to you.

Your order runs from the bottom upwards, even though you are not bonding yet. Begin at the line of the base profile, because whether all the rows above it come out level hangs on that, and only climb a position higher once that line is right the whole way round the house. Work the other way about and you are correcting at the bottom what you already fixed at the top. So walk the complete bottom edge round first, including the end wall where nobody goes.

What you carry up in one go decides how often you go up and down the ladder inside the tower. Take your measuring kit, tape, a marker and a note pad together and leave the rest below. The number of positions is routinely underestimated here: eight metres of elevation is already three to four of them, and on a corner house the side wall comes on top. Count them beforehand, because they set both the length of your measuring day and your number of days on hire.

A complete set of loose parts turns up on your plot, counted item by item on the docket. Point out beforehand where that stack is going, and keep clear the place you had in mind for the pallets, because the scaffold set and the boards compete for one corner of the driveway. Anything that comes in on a working day before 15:00 goes out again the next working day. The date for bringing and the date for fetching you fill in yourself when you reserve, so you can lay them around your board delivery.

Let the tower arrive at least a day before the boards. Then you build in peace while the plot is still empty, you can measure up that same afternoon, and you see exactly where the pallets will be able to stand dry. Putting it together remains your job: the set arrives with a manual and a video runs through the sequence, and two people are busy for half a day. The succession of parts is set out in the step by step guide for building up.

Storing the material dry is half the job here. Insulation boards that have got wet will not bond, so stand them on pallets, sheet them past the bottom edge and put them out of the wind behind the tower rather than beside it. Dismantling is yours, taking away is ours: lay the parts down complete where the van can reach. The amount that applies for the run in your own province is stated at the delivery charges per province, so you can take it into your budget at once.

The deck you stand on may carry two hundred kilos per square metre, load class 3 within EN 1004. During this preparation the temptation is strong to lay a few bundles of boards up there in advance so you do not have to keep passing them up. Leave that alone: a bundle like that does not weigh much but claims the whole deck, and together with two people and tools you approach the limit sooner than expected. More on that is in the explanation of loading and weight.

Because you move about so much at this stage, the fixed rules come up more often here than on other work at an elevation. Brake the wheels the moment you climb on, never wheel the tower with a person or loose items aboard, and fold all four stabilisers firmly out again after every move. If the wind gets up, put the work down: a sheet over the board stack and a loose roll of film on the deck are neither of them things you can master one handed.

The hazard that really suits this phase lies on the ground. Pallets, sheeting, offcuts and an extension lead all end up around the foot, and that is precisely where you step off with a tape in your hand. Keep the strip under the platform empty, run leads along the wall instead of across your walking line, and hang your measuring kit on a loop rather than laying it on the edge. The complete rules are at working safely at height.