Maintenance? Choose the right scaffold.

For a round of small maintenance the narrow RS51 at 75 cm is usually the wisest choice you can make. Not because it carries the most, but because it gets past everything: through the gate to the back, between the hedge and the wall, along the car on the drive. That counts for more than a roomy deck, because in one day you visit three or four spots. And you have to be able to nudge it along on your own, even once your help has gone home for the afternoon.

With heavy items on your list the picture shifts. If a window has to come out, a cladding panel goes back or two of you are working side by side, the RS52 at 135 cm is worth considering, provided the openings allow it. For jobs inside the house, such as a ceiling light or a crack in the stairwell, you would rather hire the RS44 room scaffold: it fits through an interior doorway from roughly 70 cm and gives you three to four metres of working height indoors.

Doing the whole round single handed brings the MiTower into view: just as narrow, built around one person and usable up to a little over six metres. The advantage is that you raise and reposition it alone, which with a string of small tasks can be decisive. So choose your model on the heaviest and the highest point at once, not on the average item. Every version stands side by side with its dimensions where you reserve a mobile scaffold.

The mistake made most often with a list is hiring on the average. You put four jobs on paper, three of them sit at three metres and one at six, and then a build gets ordered that just fails to reach that one. You work the list down to that last point and then have to start all over again. So look at which item on your list sits highest, measure that point and match the rest of the round to it. Lower is always possible, higher is not.

The lowest build reaches 4.2 metres, and that covers everything at ground level, a carport, the underside of first floor frames and the edge of a shed roof. If the gutter of a two storey house appears on the list, you are around 7.2 metres and you hire accordingly. The arithmetic is straightforward: the deck lies under your feet and about two metres of reach comes on top of it, so your platform ends up hanging somewhere between 2 and 5 metres.

Always measure on the spot and not off a photograph. A drive that falls away, a raised terrace or a basement under the front door shifts your starting point by half a metre without warning. If you cannot decide between two build heights, take the more generous of the pair; it costs barely anything more and it saves you a second reservation. What a middle size actually gets you is spelled out under six metres of working height, which for most maintenance lists is precisely the right order of magnitude.

With a list you are not standing in one place but in four. Front garden, drive, side path, back garden: walk them all before you reserve, because the most awkward one decides what you hire. Usually that is the side path, where the meter box, the wheelie bin and the downpipe get in each other's way. Know in advance which position is the tightest and you know straight away which width still fits through and whether that particular job is better done off a ladder.

The ground often changes inside one and the same garden. In front there is paving and block work, at the back there is grass that sinks under a castor after a wet week. Put stout planks or boards ready for those soft patches, and check that all four stabilisers can genuinely be wound out at every position without one of them hanging in a border. How to take up level differences and settlement is explained in the article on levelling on unequal ground.

Clear each spot before the tower arrives and not on the morning itself. Bicycles, a water butt, planters, a shed door that swings outwards: each of those costs you a quarter of an hour per position if you only discover it while standing there with a deck board under your arm. Work out as well in which order you visit the positions, so that you never have to wheel straight through your own material. On a maintenance round that order is half the work.

Put the tasks in order of position and count half a day per spot. Four to six small items around an average house come to two or three days, and that already includes building, shifting three times and striking at the end. Do not count on clearing a list of six points single handed on one Saturday: moving and relevelling the tower costs half an hour each time, and on a maintenance round that mounts up considerably.

There are waiting periods in it as well that refuse to be compressed. Primer has to dry before the top coat goes on, fresh sealant needs time before you tool it, and a timber repair has to cure before you can sand it. Schedule those moments so that you can carry on at another position meanwhile. That way you use the days the tower is standing there anyway, instead of watching paint dry. Rain upsets that schedule, so with outdoor work reserve a spare day as standard.

Financially it pays to take that room. The meter runs at the whole tariff through the opening twenty four hours and then drops away by ninety five per cent on every day you add, which keeps a full week close to two days. For a maintenance round that is interesting: you spread the jobs across evenings and the weekend rather than cramming everything into one day. How the rental price is built up per model you will find on the overview of tariffs per model and period.

The rule that keeps a maintenance round moving: work off everything within reach at each position before you shift the tower. Your deck measures 245 cm in length, so a good stretch of wall lies within reach to your left and right. If that panel holds a frame that needs sanding, a joint that has gone and a lamp that does not work, do them one after the other. Coming back to a spot you have already stood at always costs more time than carrying straight on.

So take up the tools for the whole position, not for one task. A bucket with abrasive paper, sealant, a gun, screwdrivers, a cloth and a torch weigh nothing together and save you four climbs. What goes wrong most often with a list is exactly that: people go up with a brush, spot a loose screw and are back down ten minutes later. Each climb costs a few minutes of your rental day, and ten climbs cost you half an hour of work.

Some points on your list are a chapter in themselves and want their own approach, their own materials and sometimes a different build height from the rest. For paintwork and wet rot the explanation sits under looking after timberwork, and for brickwork, pointing and cladding you will find the account under keeping the wall itself in order. Read those for the detail per job; here it is only about which tower and which working height you hire for the whole.

The tower turns up in parts, neatly counted, and that pile stays put for several days. So pick a spot that sits centrally between your positions: a drive or a path along the side works better than the back garden, because from there you walk in every direction without hauling round the house. An order that is with us by 15:00 on a working day goes out on the working day after, so a maintenance weekend needs no arranging weeks ahead.

The arrival date and the day we come back you enter yourself in the reservation, and with maintenance it pays to set them well apart. Have the parts come on the Friday if you are starting at the weekend; you then put the thing up quietly in the evening and have all of Saturday to work. Assembly is your side of the arrangement, with the manual and the accompanying video as your guide. Two people have a five metre build standing inside half an hour.

We come to fetch the components afterwards; you make sure they lie struck and complete on the spot where they were unloaded. On a maintenance round that needs extra attention, because tools, brushes and half a tube of sealant have a habit of disappearing between the deck boards. So walk the stack over before you leave it and put your own things aside in the shed. The van then never stands at your door longer than a few minutes.

Each square metre of decking is allowed 200 kg. That allowance is what load class 3 stands for, and the standard behind it is EN 1004. On small maintenance it looks absurdly generous, until you see what goes up with a list: a bucket of water, a full tool case, tins of paint, a second person and sometimes a dismantled shutter that has to come down. Add that up before you put it all on one corner of the deck, because the weight then lands in a single place.

It is precisely on small jobs that people start improvising with the build. A guardrail not put back because it is only for a moment, stabilisers left skewed because the list is nearly done, a move with the bucket still up top: those are the things that go wrong. Brake the castors before you begin the climb, never wheel with anyone or anything on the build, and strike it in the reverse order of assembly. That applies to a ten minute task as well.

The hazards that belong to a maintenance round have to do with repetition. You go up and down often, you shift the tower a few times a day, and after the third time you start skipping steps. So walk the same circuit every time: stabilisers, brakes, guardrails, hatch shut. Keep the ground beneath you free of your own tools and stop when the wind gets up, because a deck full of loose items and a gust together are enough to cause damage below.