Assume, for now, that there is a way to keep from falling off the roof. Cleaning the debris is easy enough with a leaf blower, gas or electric. The leaf blower works the same way on the roof as it does in the driveway. If you are safe on the roof, you can blow away the leaves and pine needles that accumulate in the valleys and anywhere else where the wind doesn’t dispatch them. This tool is noisy, so wear ear plugs, and try to find a time when you won’t drive the neighbors to distraction.
One other thing: don’t use a pressure washer, like a lot of professional services use, to blow away roof debris. Unless your roof is ceramic tile or steel, using a pressurized stream of water to remove dirt and leaves also erodes the roofing material. Using it on a cedar roof, you could easily puncture the felt underlayment.
What about the the gutters? I use a pair of salad or barbecue tongs to grasp the crud in the gutters. Put a string on the tongs and tie it to your belt so you don’t drop the tongs when you throw the accumulated leaves and pine needles from the gutter over the edge. Cleaning the roof and gutters is easy in principle. To keep from falling off the roof is a little more difficult. On the west side of my house, the drop is forty feet. I’m not so compulsive about maintenance that I want my roof to last longer than I do. I bought high quality rope at REI.
Now, we’re back to the essential issue: how to use a rope to keep from falling off the roof. The roofers who put the roof on your house may have installed steel rings at the upper ridges to secure their ropes as they worked. If your house has these rings, you won’t need as much rope. You need, at least, enough rope to reach from the uppermost ridge of the roof to the ground at the farthest possible drop. To take the simplest case first, imagine a rope anchored to a steel ring on the highest ridge and hanging down the roof. You need a way to attach yourself to that rope so you can go up and down while you use the leaf blower to dispatch the crud on the roof. Using a triple sliding hitch with a loop on the hanging rope is one way to do this.
The triple sliding hitch is used by mountaineers to ascend a rope that might be hanging in a crevasse with a climber on the end of it. While there is no tension on the triple slding hitch, it can slide up or down the rope it is tied around. On tension, the knot does not slide; it grips the anchor rope and more tension only makes it tighter. The sliding loop won’t do any good unless it is attached to a harness around your waist and shoulders. There are several ways to make a harness. You can buy one or improvise.
With the safety rope and the loop attached by a triple sliding hitch to the safety rope and your harness, you can go up and down the roof blowing away leaves and other crud. As long as there is no tension on the loop, you can slide the knot up and down the safety rope while you work. If you stumble and fall, you might skin your knuckles or bruise a hip, but you won’t fall off the roof. If you step on a pine cone or slip, you might fall a foot or two, depending on the amount of slack in the loop, until the triple sliding hitch tightens on the safety rope. The knot won’t slide until you find another way to support your weight, which is keeping tension on the knot.
If you’re still with me, you probably have a few questions:
- What if there are no steel rings at the uppermost ridge of your roof?
- Even if there are rings, how do you get the safety rope up there in the first place?
- What happens if you are right at the edge of the roof, say, cleaning the gutter, when you slip?
Even if there are rings on the upper ridges of your roof, the second question is unavoidable, so we’ll take it first. How do you get the safety rope up to the top of the roof? This is the riskiest part of the process. Getting off the ladder and onto the roof can be treacherous. Debris on the roof can be slippery. Find easiest place to get on the roof and carefully climb up to the top ridge with your safety rope. Tie the rope to the ring or attach it with a butterfly knot and a carabiner. Tie into the rope hanging from the ring with a triple sliding hitch and attach the loop to your harness. Now you have a belay anchor from above that makes it a lot less stressful to go back down the ladder and get the leaf blower and tongs to clean the roof.
If there aren’t any rings at the ridge, climb the roof, at the safest place, with enough rope to drop over the other side of the house and reach the ground; it goes without saying that the rope has to also reach the ground on the side of the house you just climbed. If you have somebody on the ground to tie the rope to a tree or one of the beams of your deck, it will spare you an unsecured trip down to go around to the other side of the house yourself and secure the rope. When the roof has no safety rings, you might need another length of rope to go over the house at right angles to the first rope so that the house is criss-crossed with rope like the ribbons on a gift wrapped package. Secure the ends of your ropes at the ground–there would be four rope ends in this scenario. Another rope is needed to hang in the direction of your work, which is the safety rope to which you tie the loop with the triple sliding hitch. This rope would have been tied to a steel ring, if there had been any rings.
With a little planning, you can figure out how to place the ropes and attach the safety rope and sliding loop. The last thing to consider is how to handle the worst eventuality that could occur. If you fall near the edge of the roof, you could go over the edge and find yourself dangling from the safety rope by your loop and harness. Here we have the situation where the triple sliding hitch has your weight on it, which prevents you from sliding down the safety rope. Unfortunately, one loop isn’t much help getting you back up on the roof. Mountaineers can find themselves in a similar predicament after a fall into a crevasse on a glacier. You have the option of going down the rope to the ground, which a mountaineer in a crevasse obviously doesn’t have. The triple sliding hitch was invented for this kind of dire situation, but you need two of loops with triple sliding hitches to solve the problem. One loop is attached to the rope that kept you from falling more than a few feet. If you have another similar loop in your pocket, you can tie it to the safety rope with a triple sliding hitch, so you can put your foot in the second loop to hold your weight while you take the tension off the other one and move along the safety rope, up or down. The least stepping and sliding would be to ascend the safety rope and get back on the roof, but pulling yourself up over the edge of the roof can be difficult. It may be a lot easier to slide and step down to the ground and go take a breather.
If all this seems less than helpful, it is probably my fault. I wouldn’t have to clean my own roof if I were a better writer. If it is too much to deal with, you might add a comment to this post. My writing career has its ups and downs. If I’m really broke, I’ll give you a bid on the job.
