Can I clean my own high windows?

The ladder, for a workplace and for a home

The pages behind this guide are written for workplaces, and they say so. Victoria’s rule puts a ladder at the end of a sequence, not the start: a ladder is the option only after a higher order control has been ruled out as not reasonably practicable. The state’s ladder page leads with the same instinct: work at ground level where you can, and keep a ladder for short, simple jobs, for getting up and for getting down. Those are duties on employers and businesses, not rules aimed at a householder; what a householder can take from them is the three tests underneath, which are about a ladder’s physics and not its paperwork. And for one householder in particular the law does decide the question, because it decides whose window the work is: if the home is in a NSW strata scheme, the by-laws that govern the scheme decide whose the exterior glass is, and guide 1 sets out the regulation’s two answers.

What happens when the tests are skipped is the regulators’ own record. SafeWork NSW counts hundreds of serious fall incidents from ladders in a year, and says a great many of them come down to the wrong ladder, or the right one used badly. WorkSafe Victoria’s safety alert on ladders records two workers, in two separate incidents, who suffered critical head injuries in ladder falls, and it reports that falls are still among the leading causes of serious and fatal incidents in construction, and that the industry keeps recording serious and fatal falls where no controls are in place, or where the controls in place do not manage the fall risk well enough.

Three points of contact, the slope, the reach

The same handful of rules appears in each regulator’s version quoted here, and the wording is close enough to set side by side. Three things do most of the work: how many points of the body are touching the ladder, the angle it stands at, and what the person at the top is allowed to ask of it.

Two of the regulators go one step further and describe the mistake rather than the rule. SafeWork NSW names the pattern behind a run of step-ladder falls: someone working from one of the top two steps, or stretching past them. WorkSafe ACT describes the same failure from the body’s side, and gives the remedy people skip: a reach that is too far ends with a fall, and the fix is to climb down and move the ladder instead.

From WorkSafe Victoria’s portable ladder page, Queensland’s falls code of practice, WorkSafe Tasmania’s ladder guide, WorkSafe ACT’s ladder guidance and SafeWork NSW’s working at heights pages.

Where not to set one up

The regulators keep a second list, of places a ladder does not belong. Tasmania’s is the longest: not in a doorway or an access way unless the door is locked or a barrier is up; never stacked on a scaffold or a platform to steal height; away from live power lines unless the climbing worker is trained, authorised and using the right ladder for it; out of very wet or very windy weather; and clear of traffic unless the area is barricaded. The ACT adds the tools question: two-handed power tools are off the list for a ladder, and so are tools that throw back a lever’s worth of force when they let go, because either one can take the user off the rungs. WorkSafe Victoria puts the same test another way: a job needing two hands is a job to think again about, and to look up the hierarchy for a higher answer. And a clean window is the reason most of this matters: when using a ladder, Queensland’s code allows only light duty work, the sort where a tool can be used safely with one hand, and the ACT’s answer to a stretch is to always reposition the ladder closer to the work.

Falls happen below two metres too

The drawing at the top of every page on this site puts a line at 2 m, but no source here says a fall under that line is safe, and the state that says it most plainly says it twice. WorkSafe Victoria warns that a fall from below two metres is still a fall waiting to happen for anyone on a ladder, and its duties follow the warning down: the risk under two metres is a risk an employer has to manage, because an injury does not check the height first. Its ladder page states the same scale from the other end: any height at all can put a worker in hospital. Queensland’s falls code is blunter: a fall from a ladder has killed and maimed a significant number of workers, and plenty of those falls began at a low one. And the ladder is the tool these falls cluster around: portable ladders are among the least stable pieces of equipment in common use for height work.

For window work this is the practical heart of the guide. Cleaning a ground-floor window from a step ladder still risks a fall onto a hard surface, and WorkSafe Victoria counts a fall from a height of 2 metres or lower among the risks an employer has to manage; the code supports the other half of the choice, because where the floor level below an openable window is less than 2 m there are no specific requirements about how far it opens. The line at 2 m decides which specific requirements apply, not whether a fall can hurt: the risk of a fall is real for anyone standing on a ladder, and it does not go away even below two metres.

Reading it as a householder

Put together, the sources give a householder three honest sentences. The first is about the law’s reach: the duties above are duties on employers and businesses, written that way by each regulator, so no page here puts them on a householder cleaning their own glass. The second is the strata question, which is a legal one and easy to check: in NSW, the by-laws that govern a scheme decide whose the exterior glass is, and the model by-laws give the owners corporation the surfaces that cannot be accessed safely or at all. The third is the physical one, and it is the reason the workplace rules are worth reading even when they do not bind you: the ladder is among the least stable things to work from at height, it must stand on a solid and stable surface to keep it from slipping or toppling, and many falls from step ladders come from working on the top two steps or over-reaching.