Getting HV scaffolding right
HV scaffolding is less about the scaffold itself and more about the planning around it. A perfectly well-built scaffold in the wrong place — too close to a live conductor, across an earth path, or blocking an emergency exit route — is a failed job. We’ve been doing this long enough to know that the first site visit is where the risk is either designed out or designed in.
On a typical substation job we’ll walk the site with your authorised engineer, agree the clearance envelope for live equipment, identify the isolation boundaries, and design the scaffold to sit cleanly inside the safe working zone. If there’s no way to avoid work close to live plant, we’ll redesign the scaffold to work inside the tighter live clearances rather than relying on the outage to carry the risk.
Working with your outage programme
Outages cost money. A transformer out of service, even at low load, is a revenue hit — and the window for the scaffold to go up, the work to happen, and the scaffold to come down is often brutally tight. We preplan the erection sequence so that parts of the scaffold not affected by the live geometry can go up before the outage starts, and dismantling can begin as soon as the work is signed off. On larger jobs we’ll run a second crew for the final strip-out so we’re not the critical path back to energisation.
Ongoing framework work
A lot of our HV scaffolding is carried out under framework arrangements with DNOs and ICPs where we’re a known quantity on the system. If you’re running repeat HV works and you want a scaffold partner who already understands your safety rules, your permit format, and your outage booking process, get in touch — we’ll happily set up a framework conversation.
