Cleaning a conservatory? Choose the right scaffold.

For cleaning a conservatory you book the Altrex MiTower, a tower only 75 cm wide and built around a single user. That suits this job, because there is room for one pair of hands along a run of glazing and no more. The frame is light, rolls on four castors and can be shifted along a patio or a garden path without calling anyone over from indoors. What the model offers across its build range appears on the page about booking a one person tower.

The narrow width earns its keep twice over here. A conservatory nearly always sits at the back of the house, and the route to it runs through a gate, down a side path between the wall and the boundary, or past a fence with a hedge behind it. At 75 cm the parts go through in your hands and you still have room to turn at the corner. On the deck itself you need little: a bucket, a soft brush, a set of probes for the drainage holes and a cloth beside you.

Only move up to the RS51, which shares the 75 cm width but carries two, for instance if you are also renewing sealant or lifting out a pane and both tools and materials travel up with you. If all you want is to keep the glass clear between deep cleans, that is a lighter round of its own, described on the page about the routine wash round on a conservatory. For a deep clean the one person tower stays the sensible hire.

On a conservatory you do not measure at the gutter but at the highest edge of the glazed roof, where it closes against the back of the house. That closing profile gathers the most dirt of all, because everything washing off the brickwork above runs across it. On a single storey addition that edge usually sits between three and four metres, which puts you in a 4 to 6 metre build. If you want the wall above it as well, measure to the point where you intend to stop brushing.

Working height is not the floor under your feet. It is the deck you stand on plus roughly two metres of reach above it, because your arms carry on well past the guard rail. With the deck at three metres you are comfortable up to about five, and that gap of two metres is exactly why a three metre conservatory does not call for a six metre tower. Which builds match which figure is set out on the page about a six metre working height.

Hiring too short bites harder here than it does on a plain brick wall. The roof falls away from you, so the higher you stand the further you see across the glass and the better you spot the moss still in place. Stand too low and you reach over that slope with your arms above your head, which is precisely how the top joints end up skipped. Between two builds, take the higher one, because an extra section costs you five minutes of assembly and nothing else.

There is rarely a strip of hard standing all the way around a conservatory. A border runs along it, or grass that softens after rain, and that is exactly where the tower has to go. Lay slabs or sound boards under the castors so they cannot sink and the build stays level. Watch the step between patio and lawn as well, because five centimetres out of true at the base is obvious once you are up. Uneven ground is covered in the guide to soft and sloping footings.

Stabilisers splay outwards from the feet and ask for more room on each side than the frame is wide. Around a conservatory they meet the things that live there: a water butt under the downpipe, planters ranged against the side, an outside tap, garden furniture and the roots of a climber. Move all of that well before the delivery arrives. Shuffling an assembled tower along a wall of glass because a pot stands in the way is the one manoeuvre worth avoiding.

Never park the hired tower against the conservatory itself. Stand it parallel to the glazing, with a hand's width of air between the guard rail and the glass. Aluminium glazing bars and beads were never meant to take a scaffold leaning on them, and one knock from a tube against a pane turns into an expensive afternoon. Working on the sloping roof surface you stand back from the edge and reach across, so measure that distance first, because it decides which deck height sits best.

A deep clean of an average conservatory runs to two days. The first goes on dry preparation: brushing leaves and moss out of the joints, vacuuming the sills and clearing every drainage hole until air passes through again. Only then does water come into it, because wet moss smears and disappears into gaps you can no longer reach with a brush. Day two is the wet round, with rinsing and drying off afterwards in the same order. On a large conservatory you add half a day to that.

Book those two days as one unbroken period, because that is where the tariff works in your favour. The rate stands in full for a single day, after which 95 per cent drops off each following day of the period. A spare day in case the dry preparation overruns therefore adds very little, while a second short booking starts at full price all over again. Judging a period is explained in the guide to counting your hire days.

Count on the weather having a say in all this. Wet glass and wet profiles are hard to read, and after a shower the conservatory has to dry before you can see where the film still sits. Frost is worse, because water in a joint expands and pushes sealant beads loose. Put your hire days in a dry spell and keep the day after free as reserve. Since you decide yourself how long the tower stays, moving it along is no trouble at all.

The 245 cm deck decides how wide a strip of conservatory you finish per position. Complete that strip from top to bottom before you roll: first the joint at the house wall, then the seams between the panes, then the sill along the bottom. Six metres of glazing therefore means three positions, and a corner model adds the short side on top of that. Each move costs a quarter of an hour, so count those stops into the hire period you book.

Aluminium conservatory profiles carry an anodised layer, a thin hard skin that holds the colour and the protection together. Take sandpaper or a wire brush to it and that layer is gone for good, and the profile starts staining within a single season. Work with a soft brush and a mild product, and let it stand rather than pressing harder. The drainage holes in the bottom sill take a length of plastic line pushed through them, never the tip of a screwdriver.

What you carry up decides how often you climb back down. Take the brush, the product in a bottle you can hold, the probes, a cloth and an empty bucket for the debris, and leave everything else at ground level. Do not set the tower moving until the deck is clear and the bucket hangs on its hook below. That painstaking pace is why cleaning a conservatory asks for more hire days than a straight wash of the same glass.

The scaffold turns up counted and complete, in loose parts. Decide in advance which square metres that pile may land on, because the strip beside the conservatory is what you are keeping clear for the build itself. A corner of the drive beats the lawn, where tubes sink in and carry mud up to the deck on your boots. A booking confirmed before 15:00 on any working day puts the set at your door the working day after, and you choose the delivery date yourself.

Assembly falls to you, with the manual open on your knee and the video playing beside it. On the MiTower this goes quicker than on a wide tower, since there are fewer parts and the frame is light enough for one person to handle unaided. Do carry the components through in two trips if the side path is narrow and a gate sits halfway along it. The running order appears in the guide that walks through each build stage.

Afterwards the set is collected again, and your side of it is to take the tower down and stack the parts complete where they were dropped. Do that with the conservatory dry, so you are not packing wet tubes into a bundle. The reverse also works: an appointment at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam lets you pick the parts up yourself at no transport cost, provided tubes of that length fit your car. Provincial rates sit on the page of fixed transport charges.

The weight you bring up, a bucket of suds and a sack of wet moss on top of it, is nothing against the 200 kg per square metre that load class 3 of EN 1004 allows on this deck. The limit you do meet here is a different one: the MiTower is made for one person, so nobody climbs up alongside you to be finished sooner. What sits behind that classification is set out in the explanation of the tower standard.

Two habits make all the difference. Brake all four castors before your weight goes on the ladder, and never roll the tower a metre while buckets or you yourself are still up there. Stop as soon as it begins to blow properly, and check all four stabilisers again each time you have rolled it along. On a conservatory there is one more: the glass below you is not a hand rail. Do not lean on it, stand on it or rest a bucket on it.

The risk that belongs to this job is going slippery without noticing it happen. Wet moss makes a deck treacherous, and it travels up there on the soles of your shoes. Sweep the floor before you move the tower and keep a dry cloth to hand. Think about what is under you too, because a garden chair or a glazed roof catches dropped tools badly. The rest of what applies at height is on the page with the rules for working off the ground.