Installing spotlights? Choose the right scaffold.

For a run of recessed fittings under the soffit of a two storey house, the sensible thing to hire is the RS51, the Altrex tower measuring only 75 cm across its wheels. Narrow pays here, since the strip along the elevation is usually a border, a gravel margin or a path barely a metre across, and you nudge the tower onwards between one lamp and the next. Every width standing ready appears together on the page of mobile scaffolds you can book by the day.

Extra width buys very little on this particular job, because you work inside a circle about an arm's length across, directly above your head. Within reach you keep a cordless drill, a hole saw in the right diameter, a vacuum hose and a pair of strippers. The dimension that genuinely counts is the platform length of 245 cm, which at normal centres covers two or three fittings from one run. Everything else hangs in a bucket off the guardrail, leaving the deck clear so you can step aside without treading on anything.

Only move up to the wider RS52 at 135 cm when two of you are aloft together, or when a cable reel, a carton of housings and a transformer must all travel up at once. The MiTower is rated to 6.2 metres and suits one lamp beneath a low canopy, yet for a soffit above the first floor that single-person tower simply runs out of height for installing spotlights. What the slim model does cover, builds included, appears at the one-person MiTower and its builds.

What you measure to here is the underside of the soffit rather than the gutter, since that is where each housing finally vanishes. Two storeys sets the working height at 6 to 8 metres, the deck resting somewhere on four to six. The arithmetic behind that is plain: take whatever the platform stands at, then add the couple of metres you still reach while upright on it. Which build matches the band is worked through on the page about getting up to eight metres, so you book with a figure in front of you.

Inside that band this job wants the taller build, deliberately so. Brushing a board with your fingertips is nothing like driving a hole saw through it, and the second asks for bent arms rather than a full stretch. Aim, then, for a deck where the ceiling board sits roughly a hand's width above the crown of your head. Stand too far below and the saw starts to wander, walks off centre, and the rim of the housing no longer covers the damage left behind in the board.

Something people routinely skip when installing spotlights: the tape drops to the spot the wheels will rest on, not to the threshold of the back door. Should the garden fall away towards the fence, or the terrace have been sunk, the entire build travels down with it and you finish one section short. Where the run continues above first floor ceiling level, take the roomier build rather than the tight one, because spare reach is never what anyone ends up regretting.

A soffit can jut half a metre proud of the brickwork, and that is precisely what your top guardrail meets first. Hold the tower a hand's width off the masonry and reach inwards with a straight arm instead of shoving it tight to the wall. As you line the thing up, watch where the uprights land. It is a genuine nuisance when the spot a lamp belongs in falls directly behind a tube, since you then cut at an angle or shift the whole scaffold once more.

Level ground under an overhang is rare. There is normally gravel, a border, the route to the back door, and something planted in the middle of it: a water butt, an outside tap, a bike rack or a crawl space grille. Four stabilisers swing out at an angle and claim more room all round than the tower itself occupies, so clear that strip before the parts are dropped off. For a sloping path or a rocking slab, ground that refuses to sit level offers the remedies.

Where somebody parks under the overhang, or an awning hangs across it, settle that a day beforehand. In the same breath consider power: you want an extension lead reaching the deck from an earthed socket without pulling tight over the rail, and the circuit feeding the existing lamps goes off before you loosen a single core. Tape a note to the consumer unit if others in the house know nothing whatever of your plans for the afternoon.

Where a supply cable already runs through the soffit and you need only cut, loop through and terminate, six to eight housings go in within one day. Where that cable is absent, a board must come down or you are fishing a wire behind a fascia, two days is the honest figure. Count the chalking as work in its own right: getting the run dead straight eats the first hour of the morning, and you claw that hour back again at every opening after it.

A wait is built into this job that nothing on earth speeds up. Whether the run is true, whether every beam falls the same way, whether one lamp burns a shade different: all of it only shows once it is properly dark outdoors. Anyone having the tower carted off that same afternoon stands on the pavement at nine, peering up at a crooked housing with nothing to climb. Keep an evening inside the stretch of days you have the scaffold beneath you.

That barely moves the rental price. Full rate covers the opening twenty four hours only, while each further day you add is invoiced with 95 per cent taken off, so one more night standing hardly registers at all. Booking tight is the actual risk, because a second assembly to straighten one housing spends half a working day on entirely the wrong activity. What the various models and builds come to is laid out on the page listing what each build costs.

On a deck of 245 cm you normally finish two or three housings, depending on the centres you chalked. Complete such a group entirely before rolling on: mark, pilot, cut, loop the cable through, squeeze the springs and click it home. Anyone circling the whole elevation cutting first, then coming back later to fit, doubles the number of times the tower has to be shifted and loses half a session to nothing but moving it about.

Before the hole saw goes in, sound the depth from the deck you are already standing on. Drill a small pilot, push stiff wire in and feel how much free space sits behind the board, because a purlin or a layer of insulation quietly spoils the plan. Finding that out from the tower saves rolling back later. In the same breath decide where the driver will lie, since reaching it again years hence should not need a second hire period.

Always loop through with slack in hand. Leave a generous bight between two housings and the cable will not drag the fitting crooked in its spring clips, which spares real fiddling at height. Switch the run on the moment the last one is home, not once the tower lies in pieces on the grass. Where you are fitting lamps elsewhere along the elevation inside the same booking, keep those on a separate circuit and test them apart from this run, so a fault in one does not send you back up for the other.

Your scaffold turns up as loose parts, counted and complete as a single set. Settle beforehand where that stack may land, since under the overhang is where you will be working and the middle of the drive puts it in front of the car by morning. A corner of the lawn or the path edge serves well, provided nobody must squeeze past on the way to the bins. Orders settled before 15:00 on a weekday leave the yard the next working day.

Arrival and departure dates are both pinned by you at the moment of booking. On this job it may as well come a day early, since assembly belongs to you: two people need a couple of hours, guided by the manual and the video accompanying it. Push that to the morning of the cutting and you end up chalking while the daylight already drains away. The order the parts go together in sits in the step by step build guide.

Collection is ours; taking the tower apart and stacking the set complete is yours. Hold off until the run has been lit once, or you are back the following day beneath a housing that will not play, holding a ladder and a problem. Tick parts off as you separate them and nothing goes astray at handover. Which fixed amount your province carries for the round trip stands on the page about delivery and collection charges by province.

Load class 3 under EN 1004 belongs to this tower, amounting to a deck rated for 200 kg on every square metre; with a cordless drill and a carton of housings you stay a very long way beneath that. Weight is not your problem while installing spotlights, but the force you apply certainly is. Cutting above your head presses you down and shoves the tower off the wall, so wheel brakes go on before a single boot touches the first rung.

Nobody and nothing stays on the deck while you roll, and after each move the four stabilisers go firmly down once more. Should the wind get up, work stops: under an overhang you notice little of it, whereas on the top deck you stand in the full gusts. Kill the circuit before opening existing wiring and prove it dead with a tester, even when you are entirely certain which switch belongs to which fitting in the house.

That leaves the pair of things that always go wrong with spotlights: dust and dropped tools. Sawdust out of a ceiling board comes straight into your face, so goggles on and mouth shut for the final millimetres of the cut. Keep the ground beneath you clear of children, the dog and the courier, because a hole saw breaking free lands exactly there. The rest of what applies aloft sits at the rules for working at height.