Facade maintenance? Choose the right scaffold.

While the job still has no name, the RS52 is the safest bet for facade maintenance: the wide build, 135 centimetres deep. You are buying that depth deliberately. You climb up to look, and the moment you find something you want to deal with it without descending the full height first. A bucket of suds, a brush, a sealant gun and a length of batten stand side by side on a floor like that. The whole range sits under the mobile scaffolds we hire out.

If that deep build will not reach behind the house, the narrow RS51 of 75 centimetres wins anyway. So measure the tightest gap on your route first: a gate, the alley between two houses, a fence that opens no further, or a carport you have to pass under. Checking only a low extension or a garden wall? Then the MiTower is often enough; that one-person model reaches 6.2 metres of working height and one pair of hands shifts it. Every size sits side by side in this overview of scaffold dimensions.

The floor you stand on is 245 centimetres long at either width; the difference is the depth, and so what you can put down and whether two of you fit alongside each other without treading on toes. On facade maintenance that could still go any way, that is what settles it. A room scaffold drops out here, because it is meant for indoor work and does not go into the garden. If you do not know, assume the heaviest scenario the facade can hand you.

Working height means something other than the height your floor will end up at. Add roughly two metres of reach to that platform height and together they give the figure you hire a mobile scaffold on. For facade maintenance on a family house that lands between 5.2 and 10.2 metres: at the bottom end it covers a bungalow or a flat-roofed extension, at the top a three-storey elevation with a gable above it. Which build belongs to which figure you can walk through calmly at the various working heights.

Aim at the highest point of the elevation and not at the defect you happened to notice. That is exactly what separates this from a job already pinned down. From the pavement you pick out green growth at two metres and a split sealant line by the bedroom window, but the roof edge, the top courses and the junction with the gutter cannot be judged from below. Those are the things you want to find this year rather than next, so reckon all the way to the top.

Start your measurement under the castors, moreover, and not at the front door. A back garden often sits a step lower than the threshold, and you may then reckon from that lower level, which can save you half a build. Hire too tight and the facade is half assessed before you have to build a second time for the upper part, which costs you half a day of climbing. If your house falls between two ranges, take the height of a second floor as your marker.

On facade maintenance you usually go right round the house, and every side sets its own conditions. The front you do from the pavement or the drive: hard and level, but with the public walking past and sometimes a parked car in the way. The side elevation is often a strip barely a metre wide. Round the back you end up on grass, on block paving, or on a terrace with a fall on it. Look at every side before you book, because the awkward one decides which model you hire.

Round the feet you need more room than the build itself takes up. The stabilisers splay outwards and want a clear run at all four corners, even where the wall itself looks straight and friendly. Alongside a house that is precisely where everything stands: a water butt, an outside tap, a sloping cellar hatch, planters, the bike rack and a drain cover that catches a foot. Empty that strip before the parts arrive. For a terrace that falls away, the approach on uneven ground takes you further.

Think in advance about the changeover from one side to the next as well, because on this job that is where most of the time goes. Rolling round a corner rarely works; usually you take a section apart, carry the pieces round the house and set it all up again. Reckon half a day per side for that. If the build stands partly on public ground, keep a walkway clear for pedestrians and check with the council which part of your pavement you may occupy.

For an exploratory round along a detached house you are best booking three to five days. The first stand costs half a day of building and half a day of looking; only then do you know what is going on and the real work begins: cleaning, renewing sealant lines, swapping a weathered board, or simply recording what is due next season. Each side of the house asks for its own stand as well, and that adds up sharply in your hire period.

There are waiting moments in this you cannot compress. A cleaned area has to dry before paint goes on, fresh sealant needs time, and an elevation rained on all night does not let itself be assessed. Do this in autumn and a morning regularly disappears into mist or into frost on the north side. So plan for the moment you are certain of being through, not for the moment you would be finished if everything went entirely your way.

The rental price is put together so that booking generously barely hurts. We charge the first twenty-four hours in full; every day you tack on after that goes in with ninety-five per cent off. A spare day costs you almost nothing that way, while booking too short leaves you standing beside the van with a half-inspected facade on your hands. How long other people keep such a period, you can read at the length of a hire period.

From a mobile scaffold you can do anything that goes by hand and with light tools: looking round and photographing, brushing clean, taking off green growth, making good the odd joint, replacing sealant lines, swapping a fascia board, painting and touching in. With a floor of 245 centimetres you have some two and a half metres of wall within reach per stand. For facade maintenance on a house that is ample, and it is why this type suits the work.

There is also work you should not tackle this way. Repointing or rendering a complete elevation, where you stand in the same place for weeks and material has to go up continuously, calls for a fixed structure we do not supply and that you do not put up in a day either. The same goes for heavy elements you want to winch up and for work where you must reach far outside the guardrail. We hire out mobile scaffolds only, so no facade scaffolds, system scaffolds or cherry pickers.

Note what this page does and does not cover. Here it turns on the choice beforehand, at the moment the job has no name yet and you mainly want to know which model and which height to hire. If you already know exactly what has to happen and you do the same recurring service every year along a fixed route past numbered bays, then the page about maintaining a facade fits better. Is the wall still a riddle? Then you are in the right place.

You get the mobile scaffold delivered as a complete, counted set of loose parts. Work out beforehand where that pile may end up, because on facade maintenance the strip along the house is precisely the bit that has to stay free. A corner of the path or a spot under the carport is handier than the lawn you want to splay the stabiliser legs on later. Get your booking in before 15:00 on a normal working day and the parts are with you the working day after.

You enter the arrival day and the going-away day yourself, and on this work you let that choice run with the forecast. A dry start is worth more than an early start, certainly in autumn. Building is on your list and not on ours. A printed manual travels with the parts and an instruction film shows the order of work, so reckon on half a day with two people before you get anywhere near the brickwork.

At the end you take the build apart again and lay every part out complete; loading up and driving off we take over after that. Count as you dismantle and you know for certain no coupler is left behind in the border or behind the shed and that the set goes back whole. What we charge in your region for bringing and fetching you see at the rates per province, so you can allow for that figure in your budget.

Two hundred kilos may stand on every square metre of floor, the third load class within EN 1004. On facade maintenance you reach that sooner than on a job that is pinned down, because you take all sorts up with you precisely because you do not yet know what you will need: a bucket of water, a toolbox, a couple of battens and someone to look with you. Put what you are not using at that moment down below rather than up by your feet.

Beyond that the ordinary agreements apply, and they are not complicated. Lock the castors before anyone steps on, never roll the build a metre with a person or material still aboard, and get down the moment the wind starts pushing at the guardrail. After every move, check again that all four stabiliser legs sit well, even when you have shifted only half a stand. What else comes with working at height is set out in this explanation of working safely.

Two risks stand out on this work. The first is the clutter on the floor: on maintenance there are loose screws, bits of raked-out joint and a wet cloth about, and you step on them at just the wrong moment. The second is everything that can go down, because under a wall there are children, neighbours and the delivery driver you never hear coming. Fence off the zone below and do not work directly over a garden path or a door that opens.