Using a Scaffold Tower

I have been very busy this last week.  I hired a scaffold tower for the whole week, as the fire alarm in church needed a servicing; they need a tower to get up high enough for their long pole to reach the detectors in the ceiling.  As this is an annual task, it had to be done in July, and so I had saved a set of other tasks that would be done at the same time.  These included a repair job to the CCTV camera which is mounted high up, the replacement of some high light bulbs, and the removal of the string from balloons which has got wrapped around the fans in the ceiling of the church hall.

At this stage I will vent my anger at the church architect who told my precessors what to fit in the church without a thought for the subsequent maintenance or the running costs.  The uplighter bulbs fitted five years ago are halogens and I have proved that switching the uplighters off saves about £50 per month.  The fire alarm is overly complex, and is wireless even though you could have hidden cables in the roof structure without them being noticed.  The CCTV camera (also fitted five years ago) had a wonderful pair of devices which allowed the video signal and the control inputs to share the same cable.  Great idea, but it's another two components which can go wrong - of course one did, probably in my view because of the known dampness under the suspended wooden floor.  Guess what? These boxes are no longer made so we would need two new, bigger ones at vast price.  However, we fixed that issue by laying the extra cable instead so now there are two less components to go wrong.

Anyway, there was a need to remove the tower from the church for Sunday and, as the hall was also in use, I brought it over to my house for "storage".  It seemed sensible to make use of it so this weekend I have:
a. Refitted the stuff in the gutters that prevents leaf build up (and they are now held in by some wire)
b. Fitted tingles to hold the three slipping slates in the area of the vent slates in the roof (done poorly as they were an afterthought...)
c. Tackled the poor pointing and defrassing on the west wall - there was thin cement over the pointing in some places, and spalling stone elsewhere, plus some large holes which I had blocked temporarily three years ago...
d. Then I had to tidy up the bits and dust all over the path below!

The aluminium 6 metre tower is a wonderful design.  It has three pairs of frames, with easily fitted clip-on bars in two lengths - one for the horizontals and one for the diagonals. Every item is very light; there are four stablisers, and wheels on the bottom of the frames.  On Saturday, Jane and I erected most of it in about 20 minutes; the difficult bit is positioning the top platform at the right level, but I found that the height was adequate at the top of the second frame which avoided that difficulty. I actually got her to go up it once just so she could agree that it is safe when you are up there (and so stop worrying!).  On Monday after doing the wall I took it down on my own and moved it to the church hall, all in about 45 minutes.

Then in the hall on Tuesday we attempted to remove the string from around the fans in the ceiling.  This string is the residue from balloons released by hirers who think it's funny to watch them going round! Sadly, this was one job we couldn't complete, although we did remove the balloons which surprisingly had been there for over three months with no sign of deflating.  The reason we couldn't fix the string was that the tower was too low with two sections and too high with three.  It turns out that we should have had some half frames which would have been just right, so that job will have to wait until next year.

On Wednesday the tower was taken away at last, and I have to say that it has been a most tiring week! I lost count of the number of times I went up and down the tower - at least I should be a bit fitter!