Solar panel maintenance? Choose the right scaffold.

On an inspection round you carry more up than you do on a fixing day: a torque wrench, a multimeter, a cloth, a torch and often a tablet or phone with the yield figures on it. None of that fits in your pockets, and you do not want it in your hand while you are feeling a clamp. So you hire the Altrex RS52, at 135 cm the wide version, so that tools can stay lying on the deck while you shuffle along the row.

When the way through to the back garden forces it, the RS51 of 75 cm stays a usable alternative; it costs you working room up top, but it gets past everything. The MiTower is too low for this job, since it does not reach the top row of a pitched roof on two storeys. A room scaffold is out from the start, because this work happens outdoors. Which models stand ready and how they differ is shown among the towers we have for hire.

A mobile scaffold has a second advantage during solar panel maintenance: you move it on its castors along the elevation without taking it apart. On an inspection you walk the whole slope, from the left corner to the right edge, and that is three or four positions one after another. With a ladder you shift every two metres and stand wobbling on the gutter each time. The wide version also rolls more steadily over a garden path, since the weight sits better across four castors.

Unlike handing panels up, solar panel maintenance means getting to the top row. That is where the end clamps sit, and they take the most from wind and from expansion. So count the top of the array as your highest point, and not the gutter. The working height you enter is the platform height plus something like 2 metres of reach on top of it. For a pitched roof on two storeys the band runs from 8 to 12 metres, and the top row usually puts you at the upper end.

Down below your measurement starts at the castors, and they often stand somewhere different from where they stood during the installation. Gardens change: there is a new patio, a shed has appeared or the lawn has been raised with a layer of sand. So walk the standing place again before you reserve, even if you knew exactly where the tower fitted five years ago. Worked through lift by lift, that is a twelve metre working height. Old notes are no substitute for a fresh look at the ground.

Hire a build that is too low and you reach the top end clamps only at full stretch, and then you cannot feel whether a bolt is still tight. That feeling is the heart of this job. An inspection you carry out halfway also equals no inspection at all: you write down that everything is in order while you have barely looked at the top row. If your roof sits at third floor level, go one build above your first estimate.

Maintenance is usually planned for spring or autumn, and you notice that in the ground. A lawn that is dry and hard in July is a sponge in November. So put the tower on the patio, the drive or a paved path rather than on grass, and slide a couple of slabs or a thick board under the castors if you must. What to do with soft or crooked ground, including running boards, is covered in the article on ground that is not level.

Around the foot the stabilisers must be able to fold out fully, and beside an existing installation that area is often already occupied. The cables from the inverter sometimes run along the wall to the inside, there is a water butt under the downpipe, and the garden has grown up in the years since the array went on. Cut that shrub back before the tower comes; with a scaffold against it you cannot, and you damage both the plant and your temper. Do that in good time, because the cuttings need clearing too.

Set the first position at the end where the first string begins, so that your inspection and your meter readings follow the same order. Walk left to right while your inverter list runs right to left and you lose count halfway. Keep a few centimetres between the guardrail and the gutter as well; an older gutter has brackets and sometimes a fascia band that you otherwise pull off. So move gently and glance upwards at every position before you shift further along.

An inspection round over one roof slope with twelve to twenty panels costs you a day, the build in the morning included. You read the inverter out the evening before, so that you know up top which string or which panel stands out. Without that preparation you walk the same row twice, and that is exactly why a maintenance day runs on to a day and a half. So reckon with a day of work and a day of slack in your reservation.

It becomes two days as soon as something has to be repaired. A clamp you torque takes a minute, but a rail that has dropped means taking panels off and levelling again. You only find that out standing up there with your hand on the line. A second roof slope on the other elevation counts as a separate day too, because the tower has to come partly apart and go up again on the far side. Take that possibility into your period.

Booking generously is especially logical for solar panel maintenance, because you do not know in advance what you will find. You pay in full for the first twenty four hours; the discount on every hire day beyond that is 95 per cent, and a spare day in hand therefore costs next to nothing. If you never get to it, the set may go back early. How people judge that period is covered in the piece on setting your hire period. A round you rush is a round you repeat next month.

From a platform of 245 cm you take in about two panels at once. Work each position from the bottom upwards: first the lower end clamp, then the mid clamps, then the rail and the hook beneath it. A clamp that has come loose shows itself in the play in the panel; a rail that has dropped shows in the line between two panels that no longer runs true. Note per position what you find, or by the end you no longer know where it was.

Under the panels runs the cabling, and that is often where the real work sits. Cable ties go brittle in sunlight, so after a few years a bundle hangs loose and rubs on the tiles. Connectors that were never fully closed let moisture in. From the wide deck you can look under the bottom row with a lamp without hanging your whole upper body over the gutter, and that is precisely why you hire a scaffold for this. A head torch leaves both hands free for the connectors.

What people misjudge is the time that comparing figures takes. You have the yield per string, you have a roof with two orientations and you have to work out which panel belongs to which value. Do that at the kitchen table and then go up to the row that stands out. If there is dirt on the glass as well, put a wash of the array into the same period. Two jobs on one booking saves a whole delivery run.

We supply the scaffold as a set of loose parts counted off on the delivery note. An order that lands with us under the 15:00 mark on a weekday leaves the following working day, so an inspection you think of on Monday can happen on Wednesday. Drop the parts in a spot where they will not block the gardener or the wheelie bins, because they will lie there for a few days. A corner of the carport works well for that.

Putting it up stays your work. A manual comes with the delivered set and the instruction video shows the order online; two of you will have the deck at height well inside one morning. You decide the arrival day and the day the set may leave, which is handy for maintenance because a round like this often depends on the weather. In steady rain you shift a week, and moving it costs you nothing as long as you tell us. Weather forecasts change, and so may your chosen day.

After the last round you take the tower apart and stack all the parts in one place; we come and take them away on the day you chose. Check while you do it that no cable tie or loose bolt has stayed between the platforms, because things like that vanish easily. What the journey there and back costs is set by province and shown, VAT included, under the transport charges. Collecting the set yourself is possible if your vehicle takes the length of an upright.

Load class 3 is where EN 1004 places these towers: 200 kg permitted on each individual square metre of deck. A maintenance round rarely comes near it, because you are carrying tools and not building material, and you are usually up there alone. Watch something else instead: a tool you put down for a second on a sloping roof slides away. Lay everything on the deck or hang it on your belt. A dropped spanner is a hazard for whoever is below.

The fixed rules stand: brakes on as soon as anyone climbs up, nobody stays on the tower while it rolls, and in strong wind you do not go up at all. That last one counts double here, because most people plan this job for the autumn when it blows more often. So look at the forecast before you fix your hire days, and put them in a calm week rather than in a gale. Swing the stabilisers back out after each move.

One risk comes with this job that other roof work does not have: the installation is live as long as light falls on the panels. So never simply pull a connector, switch off properly in the order your inverter requires and do not work on the cabling with wet hands. If in doubt, leave that part to an installer and limit yourself to the mechanical check of clamps and rails. The remaining rules are in the rules on working at height.