Guidance for people running scaffolding firms.
Practical writing on TG20, inspections and competence, from the team building ScaffoldOptix.
Scaffolds standing over Christmas: wind, storms and an empty site
A structure left up over the shutdown is exposed to the worst weather of the year with nobody on site to look at it. What has to happen before you lock the gate, and before anybody climbs it again.
Read the article →Asbestos found mid-erection: the only correct next move
A scaffolder drilling a tie into a soffit is as likely to disturb asbestos as any trade on the job, and far less likely to have been shown the survey. What happens in the next ten minutes decides whether this is an incident or an exposure.
Scaffolding on a higher-risk building: what changes for the subcontractor
The building safety regime was written for the people designing and building the structure. A scaffolding contractor still lands inside it — on competence, on change control and on the information it has to hand over.
Load classes: the specification question that decides the price
A scaffold's load class determines its bay lengths, board widths and tie pattern — and therefore its cost. Getting it from the client in writing, before pricing, is the difference between a margin and a variation argument.
From first lift to final strike: keeping one scaffold's paper trail intact
Most scaffolding firms can produce a handover certificate and a stack of inspection reports. Far fewer can reconstruct the full life of a single scaffold — every adaptation, every inspection, every change of duty holder — which is exactly what gets asked for when something goes wrong.
How to calculate scaffold meterage, with worked examples
Meterage is the number every scaffolding quote is built on, and the one most often argued about afterwards. Here is how it is measured, where the disputes come from, and two worked examples.
How to price a scaffolding job without guessing
Most scaffolding quotes are a rate applied to a measure, plus an allowance for everything the measure does not capture. The allowance is where the money is won or lost.
A bill of materials straight from the model: what it changes
When the material list comes out of the structure rather than off a pad, the quote, the load list and the yard are all reading the same document. Here is what that fixes and what it does not.
Variations: why scaffolders do not get paid for them
Almost every scaffolding firm does work it never invoices. The cause is rarely the client refusing to pay — it is that nobody can prove the work happened.