Building Maintenance at Height Applications of Rope Access Techniques



Posted: Saturday, March 28, 2009

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A common use of rope access techniques is for building maintenance tasks at height. Usually by rigging from the roof and abseiling down the side of the building facade, rope access technicians can safely and easily access areas that would otherwise be inaccessible for normal building maintenance. The usual method of access to the roof for rope access technicians is via a roof hatch or from a top floor balcony or similar. Suitable rigging points on roofs are usually fairly easy to come by, from large chimney stacks to secure balcony railings, just about anything that is solid and secure enough can be used as a rigging point for a rope access technician to rig his dual lines from (two lines are always used, a working line and a safety backup line to ensure that the rope access technician is always working safely).

There are numerous building maintenance tasks at height that can be carried out off ropes by rope access technicians, and it can often be a quicker, easier and cheaper option using industrial rope access for these tasks compared to using traditional height access methods such as scaffolding and cherry pickers. Scaffolding can often be expensive to implement, time consuming to erect and dismantle and disruptive to pedestrian and traffic flow, while cherry pickers often require road closure permission, and are in fact still limited in their ability to provide access difficult or confined space areas. Using rope access as the access method bypasses these issues, and a rope access team can usually get in fast and perform their building maintenance tasks with the least disruption possible. The usual tasks for building maintenance that rope access is considered suitable for range from gutter cleaning, gutter maintenance and gutter repair, down pipe unblocking and repair, roofing work such as re felting, flashing and other rooftop work and maintenance, faade and facia maintenance and repair such as stone work, pointing, stone cleaning, external vegetation removal which is more often than not caused by leaking gutters either from a blockage at the top or by damaged joints in the down pipe, cladding, glazing solutions such as glazing replacement at height, high level electrics and wiring, painting and cleaning in difficult access areas, window cleaning at height, and more. In fact rope access can be used as the method for access to allow technicians to carry out just about any building maintenance task at height that might crop up.

Rope access is often used for building maintenance in an industrial or commercial setting. However it can also be extremely useful in domestic settings such as large tenement blocks and other similar multi story dwellings. Taking on a rope access company to carry out the required building maintenance tasks can afford residents decent savings when compared to the cost of other alternative work at height building maintenance solutions. What is more, the hassle free nature of the way industrial rope access techniques allow work to be carried out safely and effectively with minimal disruption often make it extremely an extremely appealing option for building maintenance.

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