Project Overview
A solar array is not a one-off visit to the roof. It’s an installation crew, then panel cleaning, inverter checks, electrical inspections — a building that barely saw its roof from one year to the next, suddenly seeing it every few months, for the next twenty-five years.
That was the thinking behind this project. Ahead of a large rooftop PV installation, a food product supplier in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire appointed GB Warehouse Solutions to install 500 metres of Fallprotec EdgeSafe aluminium guardrail to the roof perimeter — safe access for the solar teams arriving next month, and permanent collective protection for everyone who follows them.
The Access Challenge
The roof edge was unprotected, and traffic on that roof was about to increase permanently.
The obvious answer — harnesses and lanyards — was the wrong one. Personal fall arrest only works if every operative, on every visit, is trained, competent and clips on correctly. That includes the client’s own engineers, the PV installers, the panel cleaners, and every third-party contractor who turns up over the next two decades. It’s a control the client would be actively managing forever, and one that fails quietly the first time someone is in a hurry.
There was a second constraint: this is a live food production site, where hygiene, contamination and continuity are not negotiable. The work had to be clean, contained, and invisible to the operation below.
The Specialist Solution
We specified collective protection — the option the Work at Height Regulations 2005 puts above personal protection in the hierarchy of control, and for good reason. A guardrail protects everyone on the roof, automatically. Nothing to clip on. Nothing to remember. Nothing to get wrong.
The system was Fallprotec EdgeSafe aluminium guardrail, engineered to suit the building’s trapezoidal profile sheet and installed to 500m of roof perimeter.
Why aluminium? It’s increasingly a design-led decision. Beyond being lightweight and corrosion-resistant, aluminium is what many end-user clients ask for because it reads far less industrial than galvanised steel — it protects the roofline without dominating it. On a food supplier’s site, where the building is part of the brand, that matters more than people expect.
GB Warehouse Solutions handled the job end to end: survey, design, supply, installation, handover documentation. One contractor, one point of accountability.
Safety & Efficiency
Our operatives worked to the Work at Height Regulations 2005 throughout, in full PPE with fall protection, to RAMS issued before a single fixing went in.
But the real efficiency was in the sequencing. Because the guardrail went in before the PV programme, the solar teams arrived to a roof that was already safe — no scaffold, no temporary edge protection, no waiting. The most expensive way to make a roof safe is to discover you need to halfway through someone else’s programme.
The Result
500 metres of permanent, compliant edge protection. The PV installation proceeded on protected ground, on time. And when the panels are live and the installers have gone, the guardrail is still there — for the cleaner, the electrician, the engineer, and everyone the client hasn’t hired yet.
The client’s duty-holder obligation is discharged once, properly, instead of re-managed job by job. That’s the difference between buying a system and solving a problem.
Planning Rooftop Solar? Design Safe Access In From the Start
The cheapest time to make a roof safe is before anyone needs to be on it. If you’re planning a PV array, roof works, or ongoing maintenance access, GB Group designs, supplies and installs guardrail, lifelines and access systems across warehousing, distribution and production facilities UK-wide — survey to certification.
📞 020 335 54311 | 👉 www.gbwarehouse.co.uk
