Removing solar panels? Choose the right scaffold.

A panel is a good metre and a half long and you need to be able to put it down somewhere while you change your grip. On a floor of 135 cm you can stand a sheet up at an angle and still stand beside it; on a narrow deck you cannot. That is why removing solar panels calls for the RS52, the wide Altrex model. Every base width and the heights that go with it sit side by side in the mobile scaffolds in our hire range.

You only fall back on the narrow RS51 with its 75 cm base when the passage to the garden forces your hand. That costs you working room at precisely the moment a panel lands in your hands. A MiTower is a one person tower reaching 6.2 metres and does not suit work where two people pass a load between them. A room scaffold stays indoors. What is left is the wide tower, standing to just under the gutter line. That is the set up with which you empty the whole array.

The sheets still need somewhere to go, so hire a mobile scaffold with that in mind too. The tower is there to get them down safely, but somebody at the bottom has to take them and stack them. Reckon on three pairs of hands if the array is large: one on the roof, one on the platform, one on the ground. Two people can manage it, but the work goes noticeably slower and you climb the ladder far more often. Fix that before the delivery day rather than on the morning itself.

For removing solar panels you want your chest at about gutter level, because then a panel comes to you without any reaching. Measure to the gutter, then, and not to the ridge. The number you book as working height is the deck you stand on plus another 2 metres of reach, so count back to the floor you actually want to stand on. Two storeys puts you around eight to ten metres; a third storey underneath takes you towards twelve. Write that figure down before you open the booking form.

Hiring higher than that serves no purpose here and actually makes the job harder. Stand above the gutter and you have to lift a panel down instead of sliding it horizontally towards you, and that is the movement in which people wrench their backs. Look at what a nine metre working height builds up to and compare it with the gutter you measured. A platform half a metre too low is every bit as awkward as one that ends up too high. Half a metre of difference decides how your back feels.

You notice a build that is too low on the very first sheet. You end up reaching upwards for a panel that overhangs the roof edge while the person above lets go, and sooner or later that goes wrong. There is no room left to shift your feet either, not with twenty kilos in your arms. Take one platform more rather than one less; at the booking stage it costs little and on the day it saves hours of struggle with heavy glass. Your shoulders will thank you by the tenth sheet.

Where the tower stands follows from where the solar panels are going to end up. Do not simply put it on the shortest line to the roof, then, but on the line between the gutter and the shed, the garage or the trailer. Every extra metre you carry a sheet you will repeat twenty times over, and across an afternoon that mounts up badly. Then check that the ground is level enough for four stabilisers and that the castors will not sink into the lawn. Walk that line once before the tower goes up.

Set that storage spot up before the first sheet comes down. Panels stand upright on their long edge, on a couple of timber battens and against a wall or a rack, never flat in a stack; under the weight of the ones on top the glass cracks. Make sure the place is dry and that nobody can run a bike or a barrow into it. Allow roughly a linear metre per ten panels, which is less than most people expect. Cardboard between the frames stops them rubbing each other.

Under the tower itself the usual demands apply: level, load bearing and clear of drain covers that a stabiliser would half rest on. A patio or a driveway is ideal; a lawn after a wet week is not, because the castors sink the moment weight lands on the deck. Slide boards under the feet and correct with the spindles. How to handle a slope is set out in the guide to uneven ground under a tower. Check all four feet again once the first lift is on.

An array of fourteen panels is off the roof in one long morning, provided the disconnection is done and three people are standing there. The disconnecting comes first and is not something you fit in between other jobs: the inverter off, the strings uncoupled, everything checked over. Add building the tower and taking it apart again and you are quickly at two hire days. A roof with two slopes, or an installation with many strings, turns that into three or four. Two of those people should have done this work before.

You need not begrudge yourself that third day. Only the opening twenty four hours are billed in full; whatever you keep beyond that carries a 95 per cent reduction, so a margin costs you almost nothing. The rental price for the build you choose is listed with VAT among our rates per model, alongside the charge for the driving. Here the margin is welcome, because you only learn how seized the clamps are once you are undoing the first row. Book the margin at the start rather than chasing it later.

Weather matters more on this job than it ever does on paintwork. A panel is a large flat surface that catches wind, so the moment it blows you stop passing sheets down, however dry it is. Wet glass is slippery and heavy to hold as well. Pick a still day and keep a spare day in hand; you set the collection date yourself, so that costs you next to nothing. A calm morning is worth more than a whole day of gusts. Watch the forecast the evening before you climb.

With 245 cm of platform length there is room for exactly two people side by side with a panel between them. The sheet comes over the gutter towards you, you turn it a quarter so the long edge sits along the guardrail, and then it goes down on a line or hand to hand to the person waiting below. Nothing more than one panel should ever be lying up there, tempting though it is once the pace picks up. Keep the next sheet on the roof until the first is down.

Numbering happens before anything comes loose. Write the number from your roof plan on each panel with a marker and note which string it belonged to. If the panels go back on the same roof later you know exactly where each one sat; if they are being sold on, you can show a buyer what you have. Without numbers you are left after an hour with a stack of identical sheets and no history at all.

From each position you take off the panels you can reach from there, usually two rows wide. Then the tower has to move, and that happens with an empty deck and nobody on board. What stays on the roof is the rails, the hooks and the cable penetrations; you strip those in a second pass, or leave them if new panels are coming. Allow for that in your hire days, because a second pass eats half a day as well. That extra half day belongs in your booking, not in your hopes.

What turns up is a counted bundle of loose scaffold parts. Point out in advance where that may lie, because the strip beside the elevation is being kept clear for the panels that are coming down. If your order reaches us before 15:00 on a working day, delivery follows the next working day. Ask for it one day ahead of your start date, leaving the build unhurried and the storage laid out. Two jobs in one day get in each other's way. Chalk the outline on the paving if the space is tight.

Building is your work and not ours. The set comes with a manual, a video shows the order of assembly, and with two people the build at this height runs to two or three hours. Block that time out, because no panel leaves the roof on the build day. We do not erect towers and we do not deliver them assembled, and neither a cherry picker nor a facade scaffold belongs to what we hire out. For work along a gutter a mobile scaffold is the obvious choice anyway.

Once the roof is clear and the solar panels are standing upright, you dismantle the tower and stack the parts together; on the date you gave us we come past to collect everything. Before then, walk the roof slope and the garden once more looking for screws, clamps and offcuts of cable. What the driving costs is fixed per province and listed with VAT under our delivery charges, so you know the amount before you book. A quick sweep now saves a puncture in the mower later.

Every scaffold deck carries 200 kg per square metre, because that is what load class 3 in EN 1004 requires. When you are stripping a roof that adds up faster than you think: two people together already weigh a good hundred and fifty kilos, and then comes a panel you set down for a moment. Keep it to one sheet at a time and put tools at the far side of the floor, spread across the deck rather than heaped in one corner. You feel the difference underfoot straight away.

The ordinary rules stand: castors braked before anybody climbs on, no moving the tower while a person or a panel is on the deck, and work stops the moment the wind gets up. That last one is no formality here, since a sheet a metre and a half across catches wind like a sail and pushes you sideways. Put all four stabilisers back out after every move before the next sheet is handed over, even if you only shifted half a row. Treat the wind limit as a stopping rule, not a guideline.

The risks while removing solar panels sit in electricity and in glass. A string is live for as long as daylight falls on the array, so disconnect in the right order and leave that part to somebody trained for it. Glass also breaks sharp: keep the zone under the tower empty, let nobody walk beneath it and sweep up fragments at once. The wind limit and the rest live in the rules for working at height. Gloves with a decent grip belong on this job throughout.