Fibre cement roofs, your safety measures?

[jerriais]

Hi,

Been out to quote a job today, nice roof, could get 25kW but it would be our first on a fibre cement roof. It will be certified asbestos free next week so no worries there but a bit concerned about how our installers will be able to work safely as it is between 4-7m off the ground. Any tips about how you've worked on these. Crawl boards is the simple option but not sure if that's safe enough. Do you normally use safety netting underneath, harness points? But then you need rescue plan. Many questions but above all want to make sure installation team are safe. Or I ask customer to put on a new tin roof first.

 

[Gavin A]

eta *Netting, scaffolding + rescue plan unless you have a team that's very experienced in harness work*


We tend to use scaf, crawl boards and hanger bolts with cruciform rails, using the hanger bolts as anchor points for harnesses, and basically anchoring and rails on as we work across the roof. The cruciform rails themselves add a level of protection and mean you can basically rest your weight on them most of the time to minimise the potential of going through.

Rescue plan is one person on the ground at all times as rescue bod (electrician told he'll be on written warning if he leaves his post without a replacement), and either ladders if safe, or we have a 1 tonne winch on scaf that can be attached to the harness to lower the person to the ground, or usually both.

On bigger jobs I'd go with netting, but for me the process of netting itself adds significant danger to those doing the netting work ie 1 day for installing it and 1 day for removing it probably for 2 people at pretty much roof height off ladders or scaf tower), so I don't really view it as being any safer for anything under 2 days of installation, and marginal for 3-4 days. Obviously this equation really depends a lot on the training and experience level of the installers involved, if no experience of roped access / harnesses then it would have to be netting all the way - we have a specific team allocated to the roof, with others specifically banned from going anywhere near the roof.

I pretty much grew up climbing and abseiling though, so probably have a bit of a different take on it to most. The official HSE approved line would be netting for all fragile roofs though, and that's definitely the route to take if you're unsure of the teams capabilities as it passes the danger on to the experts installing the netting.

You still need a rescue plan with netting mind, as it's not going to be somewhere your staff are going to want to hang around for too long if they do go through the roof - never gone through a roof myself, but understand it's pretty painful even with netting.

 

[jerriais]

Great answer (as usual), thanks Gavin!

 

[Gavin A]

it's something I've given a lot of thought to the last 18 months or so, got a 50kWp job in january on a similar roof, which I've been trying to work out what to do with, as I'm pretty sure it's not high enough for netting to definitely keep us off the large printing machinery below, some of which is quite close to the roof, even if we could get it installed.

The danger with harnesses is when complacency creeps in and you find people forgetting to clip on, which I suspect would happen more on longer installs.

ps these roofs are absolutely lethal when wet, they turn into an ice rink, so best to allow extra time in case of bad weather.