Hanging a pendant light? Choose the right scaffold.

For a single point in the ceiling you hire the Altrex RS44 room scaffold, a model built specifically for interior work. Its range runs from 3 to 4 metres of working height, exactly the band a living room ceiling, a landing or the underside of a void falls into. More telling still is its footprint: this room scaffold stays compact enough to fit in a room that still has furniture in it. Which builds are ready to go you can read back in our range of room scaffolds for indoor work.

The measurement to take beforehand is the doorway. The RS44 fits through an interior door of about 70 cm upwards, and that alone makes it the obvious model for a pendant light. Anyone working outside on a facade would hire a mobile scaffold instead, either the narrow 75 cm version or the wide 135 cm one, but those are built for far more height and want a wider opening than a room door offers. What separates the two types is set out in the comparison between both kinds of tower.

On the 245 cm platform you have more room than a light fitting suggests you need, and that works in your favour. You lay out the drill, the plugs, a connector block, a voltage tester and the fitting itself side by side, so nothing has to be hunted for while you are wiring. With a heavy fitting that length helps even more: you can rest the pendant light on the deck while you make the fixing point first, instead of holding it up with one arm.

With a pendant light the highest point is not the lamp but the ceiling rose, and that is what you measure to. Working height here means the height your platform sits at, with roughly two metres of reach added for someone standing upright on it. Under a 2.60 metre ceiling you are therefore low on the room scaffold, and under a void or a tall landing you climb towards the top of the range. What a build to four metres of working height looks like has a page of its own.

Always measure from the floor the castors will stand on, and with a stairwell that is the question to settle first. If the room scaffold stands on the upper floor beside the opening, the distance to the ceiling is simply one room height. Build it at the bottom inside the stairwell and you add the whole storey height, which takes you past the 4 metres this model manages. How to tackle that is set out in the piece on setting up around a stairwell.

Choosing too tight only shows once your neck is bent at an impossible angle under the ceiling rose. At a rose you work with both arms up and your face turned skyward, so you want that box just above eye level rather than pressed against your crown. Stand too low and you end up on tiptoe or reaching from the edge of the deck, which is precisely the posture the hired room scaffold was meant to spare you in the first place.

With interior work the route to the room matters more than the room itself. The parts come in loose, so you carry uprights, deck sections and castors through the front door, past the coat rack, round the corner of the hall and sometimes up the stairs as well. Walk that route once with a tape measure in your hand and pay particular attention to the turn at the staircase, because a long component jams there sooner than it ever does in a doorway.

Under the fixing point the floor has to be completely clear. The dining table goes aside, the chairs with it, and you roll the rug up so the castors sit on a flat surface. On parquet or laminate lay a few sheets of cardboard or a dust sheet under the base, because a castor rolling over a grain of sand draws a line you will not polish out. Watch for thresholds too: one castor up on a lip leaves the whole room scaffold out of true.

The obstacles on this job usually hang from the ceiling itself. Take the old fitting down before the room scaffold goes up, otherwise you work with a lampshade beside your head. Switch the circuit off and confirm it with a voltage tester before you climb, because from the deck you cannot nip back to the consumer unit. If you are working at a stairwell, fence the opening off so nobody comes up the stairs underneath you.

The fitting itself goes up quickly. Marking out, drilling, plug in, fixing the ceiling plate or hook, wiring and setting the flex to length adds up to half a day and often less. What runs the clock is everything around it. Clearing the room, carrying the parts inside, building, taking it all down afterwards and putting the furniture back costs you more time than the light does. Reckon on a full hire day even when the fitting takes an hour.

Two hire days are sensible the moment anything is added. If an old ceiling rose has to come off, the wiring turns out to be short, or you want a second fitting above the stairs or in the hall at the same time, the work slides into the next morning. Making good counts too: a filled hole wants to dry before you paint over it, and you would rather do that standing on the deck than balanced on a kitchen steps.

For the rental price a longer booking works out well. Only that first 24 hours counts at the full rate, and every following day you attach comes with 95 per cent off. A spare day behind your fitting day therefore costs you almost nothing while giving you room to absorb a setback. Set your end date one day beyond the date you expect to finish, because a half wired fitting over an empty dining table is a poor moment to see the van pull up.

Take up everything you need in one go, because going down for a forgotten plug costs you more in concentration than in minutes. The list runs to the drill fitted with a masonry bit, plugs and screws, the ceiling plate, a connector block, wire strippers, a voltage tester and the light itself. Lay it all along one side of the deck and keep the other side clear, so you can stand under the ceiling rose without stepping over your own tools.

Setting the drop is a job for two. You hold the fitting while the other stands back and says whether the flex hangs at the right height over the table and whether the light comes out in the middle. Without that second person you go up and down five times, and each time you nudge the room scaffold along because you are standing slightly differently. Agree a fixed height above the table top before you start cutting anything.

Moving about is barely part of this job. If it stays at one light, the room scaffold stands in the same spot all day and you work from a single position. Take in the landing or the hall at the same time and you shift it twice or three times, and then the 245 cm length starts to count: a fitting slightly off centre stays within reach without rolling. Clear the deck before you move it anywhere.

The room scaffold arrives at your home in sections: uprights, deck parts, braces and castors, counted and complete when it leaves us. Say beforehand where that stack is allowed to sit for a day, and steer clear of the hall, because the hall is the very route everything has to travel along. The garage, the shed or a corner of the front garden works better. Booking on a working day is possible until 15:00, and the set is then on your doorstep one working day later.

Which day it arrives and which day it disappears again is yours to decide when you book. With interior work you can plan that tightly, since rain and wind play no part. Have the parts delivered on the morning you are clearing the room anyway and you build in the same movement. Assembly belongs to your side of the job: the manual and the video take you through the order step by step, and with two of you the deck sections lift far more easily over a threshold.

Collection we arrange, dismantling you do. Carry the parts back outside and leave them complete where you agreed, so loading costs the driver a couple of minutes. While you are taking it apart, walk the room once more, because a locking pin that has rolled behind a cabinet only surfaces when the set has gone. Bear in mind too that bringing and collecting together is a fixed amount per province, VAT included. Those amounts are on the rates for delivery and collection.

The deck under your feet carries 200 kg per square metre; that figure is load class 3, the class EN 1004 sets for a tower like this. For a light fitting that is generously sized, since you, a drill and a fitting of cast iron or glass together do not come close to it. What you do watch on this job is how your weight is spread. Do not hang off a corner of the deck to reach the last patch of ceiling; roll the room scaffold half a metre instead.

Indoors the same rules apply as outside. Brake the castors before your foot touches the bottom rung, and never roll the room scaffold along with someone on it or with tools left up top. What drops away here is the wind limit, which belongs outdoors; inside you watch a draughty front door and a banging interior door instead. Wedge those before you climb. Everything else on that score is listed under the safety rules for high work.

The risks that come with this job sit in the electrics and in what falls. Work dead and check that again from up top, because a ceiling rose hangs off an unexpected circuit more often than you would like. Let nobody walk under the deck, since a screwdriver rolling off the edge lands squarely on the dining table or on the stairs. Sweep the drilling dust off the deck at the end, because grit under your soles makes the floor you stand on surprisingly slippery.