Height safety installation & certification, Melbourne.

A duty you can't ignore

Compliant systems — installed, tested and certified.

If anyone works at height on your building — cleaners, maintenance crews, contractors — you have a duty to provide safe, compliant access and to keep it certified. Anchor points and fall-arrest systems generally need recertification at least every 12 months, and a system that isn't tested is a system you can't rely on.

360 Access installs, inspects, tests and certifies height-safety systems to the relevant Australian Standards, and gives you a documented register of every point. Because our rope-access technicians work on these systems daily, we install and assess them the way they're actually used — not from a catalogue.

System types

The four systems that make a roof safe to work.

Most Melbourne buildings need a mix of systems rather than one product — the roof geometry, the façade drops and the tasks people actually perform up there decide the layout. The core system types:

• Roof anchor points. The backbone of most height-safety systems. Surface-mount, top-fix or concrete-fix anchors rated for fall-arrest and rope-access loads, positioned so every gutter, plant item and roof edge can be reached in restraint — plus abseil-rated anchors over each façade drop for rope-access work. Selection depends on the substrate: steel purlin, concrete slab or timber structure each takes a different fixing.
• Static lines. Horizontal lifeline systems giving continuous, hands-free attachment along a long roof run or plant corridor — the right answer where clipping anchor-to-anchor would be slow or would tempt workers to skip connections. Engineered end-loads, intermediate brackets and clear span limits, inspected as one system.
• Ladder brackets and fixed ladders. Ladder-access brackets give portable ladders a compliant, repeatable tie-off point for low-roof access; fixed ladders handle permanent level changes, with fall-arrest rail or cage where the height requires it. Designed and checked to AS 1657.
• Guardrails and walkways. Permanent edge protection and delineated walkways to AS 1657 — the highest-order control, because guardrail removes the fall exposure instead of arresting it. Where sightlines or heritage façades rule out fixed rail, collapsible and setback rail systems keep the roofline clean without giving the protection away.

The hierarchy of control runs through every design decision: eliminate the exposure with guardrail where practical, keep workers in restraint where it isn't, and reserve fall-arrest for the tasks that genuinely need it.

Design that gets used

Designed for rope-access crews and maintenance workers alike.

Plenty of Melbourne roofs carry systems that exist on paper but don't work in practice: anchors in the wrong plane for the façade drop, no rated points where the abseil crew actually needs to rig, static lines that strand a worker short of the gutter. A system like that gets bypassed — which is worse than no system, because it looks like compliance. We design for both groups who will actually clip on:

• Maintenance workers — cleaners, HVAC techs, electricians and roofing contractors. Restraint-first layouts so a worker on a lanyard can reach the gutters, plant and roof edges they service without ever entering fall-arrest, with travel paths that make the compliant route the easy route.
• Rope-access technicians — abseil-rated primary and back-up anchors positioned over each façade drop, sane rigging clearances, rope protection at edges and deviation points where the façade steps. Because our own rope-access technicians hang off these systems every week, layouts come from use, not from a catalogue.

The payoff is commercial as well as safe: window cleaning, façade maintenance and inspection quotes come back sharper when contractors aren't pricing workarounds for a roof they can't use.

New build or existing roof

Height safety installation — what actually happens on the roof.

Choosing the system is the easy part. The installation is where a height safety system is either genuinely load-bearing or quietly useless, because an anchor is only ever as good as what it is fixed to. Before anything is installed we establish what the substrate actually is, which frequently isn’t what the drawings say:

• Structural concrete — chemical or mechanical anchors set to the manufacturer’s embedment and edge distances, with cover checked so the fixing isn’t landing on reinforcement.
• Structural steel — through-bolted to purlin or beam, sized to the member rather than to the bracket.
• Metal deck roofing — spanning brackets that transfer load into the purlins beneath. An anchor fixed to roof sheeting alone is not an anchor, and it is one of the more common defects we find on existing systems.
• Timber — into a verified structural member, never into battens or sarking.

Every installed anchor is proof-load tested on installation, not just at the next annual inspection — typically to 15 kN for a single-point fall-arrest anchor. It is then tagged with a unique ID and entered on the building’s register with its type, location, fixing detail and test result, so the system starts its life with a complete record rather than one assembled later from memory.

As the installer we hand the system straight into its own testing and recertification cycle, which means the same people who know how the system was fixed are the ones assessing it a year later.

Audits and inspections — what actually gets checked.

An inspection is not a walk around with a clipboard. On an existing building, a height safety audit establishes three things: what is actually up there, whether it is compliant, and whether it suits the work the building genuinely needs done.

• The full inventory — every anchor, static line, rail, walkway, guardrail and ladder found and located, including the points nobody has a record of. Registers are very often incomplete.
• Condition and fixing integrity — corrosion, movement, sealant failure at the penetration, and evidence the fixing is into the structure rather than the cladding.
• Load testing — proof testing where required, with pass and fail recorded per point rather than per roof.
• Tag-out of failures — anything that fails is physically tagged out on the day, not noted for later.
• Coverage against actual use — whether the system reaches the elevations that actually need maintaining. A compliant system that can’t reach the façade being cleaned is a common and expensive gap.

The output is a register and report you can produce on request, which is what an insurer or a contractor refusing to work on uncertified anchors will ask for. Equipment records matter here too — a system is only half the picture if the gear clipping into it has no traceable history, which we cover in our guide to equipment inspection and records.

New buildings and retrofits are different jobs.

On a new building, the cheapest time to get height safety right is before the roof membrane goes down. We work with the builder or designer at design stage: anchor positions coordinated with the structure, cast-in or structurally integrated fixings, penetrations flashed and warranted as part of the roof build, and the whole system handed over with its register, layout drawing and initial certification — ready for the first maintenance contractor on day one, not retrofitted after the first leak or the first refused window-cleaning quote.

On an existing building — most of the work in Melbourne — the job starts with a survey of the structure and roof build-up. Fixings are selected for the actual substrate rather than an assumed one, penetrations through membrane or cladding are detailed and sealed, and any legacy system is assessed on its merits: points that pass testing are absorbed into the new register, and non-compliant points are decommissioned and clearly removed from service rather than left as a trap for the next contractor.

Either way the destination is the same: tested points, current tags, one register, one drawing — and a roof that anyone from a window cleaner to a rope-access crew can work compliantly.