Washing a conservatory? Choose the right scaffold.

For washing a conservatory you hire a mobile scaffold built around a single user, the Altrex MiTower at 75 cm across the frame. Its whole merit on this job is weight. You shift it a metre between two panes on your own, without calling anybody out of the house, and over a morning that saves the better part of an hour. The 245 cm deck still takes two or three panes per stand, so you move less often than the glazing suggests. The choice appears in the overview of mobile towers for hire.

Up on the deck this work asks very little of you: a bucket of suds, an applicator, a squeegee and a chamois in your back pocket. All of that sits easily on a floor 75 cm across, and any more width would only push you back from the glass you are trying to reach. Length is the measurement that earns its money, because over 245 cm you walk two or three panes off in a single stand without shifting your feet. Anything else waits at ground level.

There is one case for stepping up to the RS51, the rolling tower of the same 75 cm that carries on far above 6.2 metres: a wash round that does not stop at the conservatory but runs on up the wall to take the first floor windows in the same session. Moss grown into the joints and silted drainage holes are a different booking again, slower and drier, laid out day by day on the deep clean round on a conservatory.

The top of the job is the line where the glazed roof meets the brickwork, and that is also the dirtiest pane on the whole structure, since everything running off the wall passes over it. Put the end of your tape on that line rather than on the house gutter far above it. A garden room on the ground floor usually brings you out between three and four metres, and a 4 to 6 metre build answers that neatly. Booking a taller tower than the glass needs gains you nothing at all.

The number you book is not the height of the floor you stand on. Working height on the order is the deck plus about two metres of arm, so a deck at two and a half metres has you squeegeeing comfortably to roughly four and a half. That is the right band for a single storey garden room with a low pitched roof over it. Which build goes with which figure appears on the page about a five metre working height.

There is a second reason not to book tight. On the sloping roof surface you reach further out than at a flat pane, and that extra arm length has to come from somewhere. Standing higher you look down onto the glass and see at once where suds are still lying; standing low you look along it and miss exactly those patches. Where two builds would both do the job, take the taller of the two, because an extra section costs minutes while a second visit costs you a whole morning.

On a wash round one perfect position matters less than an unbroken run. You shift a deck length at a time, so walk the whole line beside the glazing beforehand and check that the castors can roll everywhere along it. A loose slab, a sunken corner of patio or a raised threshold onto the lawn stops you halfway along, and then you are standing up there with a full bucket waiting. Clear any obstacle before the tower goes up rather than halfway through the round with a bucket in hand.

The garden hose belongs in that picture too. You want to top the bucket up at ground level without walking to the tap every time, so lay the hose on the side where you start and drag it along with you. Make sure it never lies under a castor or across a stabiliser leg, because that is where it snags the moment you move the tower. The same goes for the extension lead of a vacuum; coil both of them up as soon as a stand is finished and before you release the brakes.

Think about what happens below you as well. Suds running off the sloping roof land on the border, on the garden furniture and on the paving below, so move chairs and cushions aside and cover anything tender. Where the conservatory sits on the boundary, warn the neighbours before you start rinsing anything down. And check whether the ground still carries after rain: on soaked grass the castors sink in and the tower leans out of true before you notice it.

An average conservatory washes down in a day, and often in a single morning. Allow a quarter of an hour to twenty minutes on each stand for the roof and the upright panes together, plus the time it takes to move along. With three or four stands you are finished by early afternoon, the inside of the glass included. Only a conservatory that turns a corner, or one nobody has touched for two seasons, pushes the work into a second day of hire.

Even so, hardly anyone books exactly one day. The weather steers this job harder than you would expect: sun on the glass dries your suds before the squeegee arrives, and frost freezes the pane shut on you. A day of slack in the hire lets you swap mornings around without rebooking anything at all. A generous period makes sense here for a second reason as well, since day one carries the standard figure and 95 per cent is taken off each further day you keep the tower.

If washing a conservatory is only part of a full clean round the house, count further. Doing every elevation of a dwelling soon takes two days, and you do not want the tower collected halfway through. Which jobs need how long is laid out in the guidance on judging a hire period. Push your end date a day further out rather than a day nearer, because rebooking the same tower later starts you again on a full opening day.

Washing a conservatory means coming down the glass, never up it. Start at the ridge profile where the roof closes against the wall, do the sloping panes next and finish at the conservatory gutter. Turn that round and dirty water runs off the top over panes you had already finished, and you are starting over again. For the same reason you complete the full height of one stand before rolling the tower a metre, instead of doing a whole band of roof lights end to end.

The enemy of this work is suds drying on you. With sun on the pane your water has gone before the squeegee reaches it and you polish streaks in rather than out. Work the shaded side, or start early in the day, and wet no more glass per stand than you can pull off again in one movement. Hard mains water leaves lime rings as it dries, so pull each pane straight after wetting it and leave no drops standing on the gaskets.

The verdict is passed indoors. A streak on the outer pane is barely visible from the deck, yet from a chair inside the conservatory, looking up against the light, it jumps out at you. Give the outside horizontal strokes and the inside vertical ones, and any streak then announces which face of the glass it sits on. Walk the inside only once the outside is properly dry, and keep the hired tower standing until then in case a pane needs doing again.

For this job you want an early start, so have the set brought a day ahead rather than on the morning itself. Then you build the tower in the late afternoon and stand ready with a bucket at first light the next day. An order that lands ahead of the 15:00 mark on a working day goes out for the next one, so the set can be waiting on the drive when you get home. Which day they arrive, and which day they leave again, is entirely for you to place in the diary.

What turns up is loose, counted parts, and the building is down to you, with the Altrex video as your guide and the manual beside it. Set the components down on the drive or against the fence, and never on the strip the tower has to roll along later. Allow an hour the first time you build one and appreciably less once you have done it before. What to run through before you climb on is gathered in the checklist for anyone booking a tower.

When you are done, stack the parts complete in one place and the set is collected on the agreed day. Take the tower apart only once the glass is dry, so you are not bundling wet tubes together for the return. Anyone living close by can fetch the set instead: by arrangement it stands waiting at Zeeburgerpad 89 in Amsterdam at no charge for transport. What carriage comes to in your province is shown at the fixed rates for bringing and collecting.

Water weighs more than you think. Two full buckets and yourself still do not trouble the deck, which is proved at 200 kg per square metre and falls into load class 3 of EN 1004. Where you do meet a limit is the head count, because this model is designed around one user, so let your helper wash out and rinse down at ground level instead of coming up. What the standard covers is explained at the page on tower classes.

Three things happen without thinking on wet work. The brakes go on before a foot touches the first rung, you never roll the tower with the bucket still up there, and you come down as soon as the wind starts pulling at the sloping roof. Walk round the stabilisers after every move, because short frequent shifts of the tower are exactly when that gets forgotten. A tower you nudge twenty times in a day deserves the same check twenty times over.

The particular hazard of this job is soapy water under your soles. Soap on the deck makes it more slippery than a wet roof, and you only notice once you are already sliding. Put a towel down where you stand and wring the chamois out over the bucket rather than onto the deck itself. Mind the glass beneath you too: nothing dropped from the deck lands kindly on a sloping pane. Rails and edge protection are covered at the page on guard rails and fall protection.