When it’s not safe to be on a roof

With all of our safety equipment, with all our safety training, there are times when it is just not safe for our franchisees and their staff to be on the roof cleaning your gutters.

Obviously, they will not be on the roof during an electrical storm or even if the rain is heavy, but there are some other times when it isn’t safe to be on the roof that many people don’t realise.

Rain can be hazardous for our technicians even if it is only light.  This is more because of the type of roof material that if mixed with rain, even the lightest of rain, can create a slippery environment that is just not safe for our technicians.

Dew or frost.  In some of our more southern areas, if there has been a frost or even just a moisture filled night, sometimes our franchisees can not get onto a roof until well into the day rather than first thing in the morning.  Dew and frost can still be present in some areas well into the middle of the day.  These conditions can be particularly dangerous as sometimes to the untrained eye, it may seem safe to go on the roof as they sun is shining, but the roof can still be dangerous and slippery.  All our franchisees and their staff are fully trained.

Extreme heat.  Working on a roof on a hot day is absolutely dangerous.  If you think it is hot on the ground, imagine how hot it is on a tin roof or worse still is a black roof.  All of our franchisees understand how to rehydrate themselves and their team.  We even train them in this.  So if a Gutter-Vac franchisee is sitting under a tree in the middle of a job, then you will now know it isn’t because they are ‘slacking off’, they are taking a ‘heat break’ so that they don’t create a dangerous situation on the roof with the combination of heat and dehydration.

The pitch of the roof.  In some cases, even with our harness and safety gear, some roofs are just too steep to be on them.

Wind.  This is probably the one that many bystanders don’t understand.  As soon as the wind is having gusts of wind in excess of around 30 knots per hour, it is time for us to get off the roof.  Now this is not constant winds, it is even when we are just experiencing gusts of wind at this speed.  Remember too that the wind speed on the roof can be different to that of on the ground.

So what do we do?

In some situations, it is a matter of waiting for the weather to pass.  Other times we will need to rebook your job and come back on another day.  In some situations, we can use our ground worker’s kit which enables us to clean your gutters without being on the roof.  This is an invaluable tool to our franchisees especially in high frost areas.

All of our franchisees and their staff are trained to do a risk assessment before starting any job and then also to assess the risks during the work.

We don’t use the tag line Clean. SAFE. Easy. for nothing.  We take safety seriously.

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