An Edge Protection System gets specified once and installed dozens of times, but the planning often focuses only on that first installation. A mesh barrier bolted to a slab edge is struck, stacked, carted across a yard, lifted to the next floor and bolted down again, over and over as a concrete frame rises. Bent barriers, Missing pins and lost site hours mostly trace back to what happens in between those installations. The stillage is the only control point in the cycle, and it is seldom part of the spec.

Most of the life of an Edge Protection System happens nowhere near an edge. Leigh Oakley, an industry specialist in working at height, maps the journey a typical set of components can make: from the factory to a container, warehouse, truck, construction site, working floor and storage yard, before eventually moving on to the next project. Every one of those stages presents an opportunity for damage.

 

On a concrete frame, much of that journey is repeated again and again. A crew installs the system, works the floor, removes it, stores it, lifts it to the next level and reinstalls it. This cycle continues floor by floor as the building rises, meaning the barriers installed on level three could be the same barriers later installed on level twelve. There is nothing unusual about that cycle. What is unusual is how little of it gets planned for.

 

The parts that do get planned for tend to be those with rules attached. Edge Protection is a form of collective fall protection, protecting everyone working near an open edge without relying on individual harnesses or lanyards. Unlike a permanent guardrail, a temporary system is designed to be removed and reinstalled as work progresses. BS EN 13374 sets out requirements for temporary edge protection systems, while in the UK, the Work at Height Regulations 2005 establish what duty holders must do to manage the risk of falls. Together, these requirements place a clear focus on how Edge Protection should perform when it is in use.

 

But what happens to those same components once they come off the slab? That is where an important gap can emerge, and where costs can begin to build. It affects the contractor cycling the same system up twenty floors and the yard manager who eventually has to work out what has come back, what is still usable and what needs replacing.

A stillage is a steel storage frame built to hold mesh barriers, safety posts, slab clamps and attachments in a fixed position, and depending on the design it is handled by forklift, telehandler or crane. It plays no part in stopping a fall and it sits outside the product standards that govern the barrier.

Leigh Oakley draws the boundary:

"A stillage is not part of the fall protection itself. However, it supports how the system is stored, moved and managed throughout its service life."

Every stage between two installations leaves its own mark on Edge Protection components, and the marks are predictable enough to map.

Journey stage	Handling risk	Typical damage
Removal from the slab	Rushed strip-down, components dropped or dragged	Bent mesh barriers, damaged locking components
Ground stacking (yard or site)	Forklift impact, uneven loading, dirt and standing water	Damaged posts, deformed clamps, scratched coatings
Yard storage, uncontained	Components mixed across batches, no fixed position	Missing pins and connectors, mismatched parts
Transport between sites	Load shift, straps cutting into coated surfaces	Scratched coatings, bent posts
Lift to the next floor	Loose components sliding or falling from an open load	Missing pins and connectors, damaged locking components

Ground stacking does the most damage of anything on that list. Barriers stacked straight onto the slab or the yard surface sit exactly where a forklift turns, where rainwater collects, and where nobody has decided how high a stack is allowed to go before the bottom layer carries the weight of everything above it.

A stillage does not fix handling discipline and it does not replace inspection and maintenance. What it does is hold the components off the ground in a known position, which removes several of those risks before anyone has to think about them. A scratched galvanized finish looks cosmetic until it becomes the point corrosion starts, on kit that is meant to go out and come back dozens of times.

Take one floor on a rising frame. The barriers come down first, struck from the completed level and walked straight into the barrier stillage, which holds 50 Edge Protection barriers of either 1.3m or 2.6m. The posts come out next into their own stillage, which takes 100 posts at either 1.3m or 1.9m. Clamps and pins go into a smaller box built for attachments, because loose pins are the first thing lost if they travel with the barriers. Three units, each holding a full floor's worth of one component type, ready to move together.

Run the same floor the other way and it takes a different shape entirely. Barriers get carried off one or two at a time, since that is what fits on a hand trolley or across two pairs of arms, and the posts follow on a separate trip, often with a different person. Something gets left behind on a floor that has just been cleared, because nobody was checking a count against a fixed load. Multiply one missed post by however many floors are left before topping out and the difference between the two ways of working stops being a matter of tidiness.

The rule of thumb is one stillage for barriers, one for posts, and a smaller stillage or storage box for attachments, because barriers and posts have completely different dimensions and mixing them into one unit wastes space in both directions. That pays off hardest on high-rise work, large concrete frames, repetitive floor layouts and long runs of perimeter protection, where the same three units cycle up the building dozens of times.

Whether the loaded stillage travels by forklift, telehandler or crane depends on the stillage design and the site's own lifting plan. What stays constant is the count: a full stillage tells you at a glance whether the next floor is getting a complete system or a partial one.

Barriers are hard to lose. A 2.6m mesh barrier does not fit in a pocket or slide under a pallet, whereas bolts, pins, clamps, connectors and socket parts do exactly that, which is why they are the components that actually stop an installation running to plan.

The value of one missing pin is not the problem. The problem is what it does to the programme: a run of Edge Protection sits unready while someone hunts the yard for a replacement, or strips a fixing from another bay that now falls short itself, or waits on stock that has to be sourced and delivered. None of that is a materials cost. It is lost time on a floor that was supposed to be handed over.

A defined return point closes the gap, because components get counted on the way in, shortages get flagged before they become someone else's problem on the next floor, and attachments go back into their own box instead of travelling loose with the barriers. That separation matters most on projects running more than one attachment type, slab clamps alongside socket bases or other fixings, where mixed components in one box make an accurate count almost impossible.

Mixing returned kit straight into inspected stock is how damaged components end up on the next customer's site. A barrier that came back bent from one job looks no different from a good one once it is stacked in with everything else, unless the yard has already decided where it goes before it gets that far.

"If returned equipment is mixed immediately with inspected stock, damaged components may accidentally be sent back to another project."

An Edge Protection hire fleet needs the same principle on the way back in that a contractor needs on the way up a frame: fixed positions for known states, so nobody has to remember what happened to a given batch. A three-way split covers most of what comes off a returning truck.

Tag	Contains	Next step
Ready for use	Inspected, complete, no defects found	Reissued to the next hire
Returned, to inspect	Back from site, not yet checked	Holds until inspection is done
Repair or review required	Damaged, incomplete, or flagged on inspection	Set aside for repair or write-off

Kit comes back bent, or impacted somewhere in transport. It also comes back modified on site by whoever needed it to fit that day, corroded after a winter outdoors, or short of parts it left the yard with. The three states only work if they are physical, which means three separate stillage groups in the yard and not three columns in a spreadsheet nobody keeps up to date. A stillage sitting in the wrong group is visible to anyone walking past it.

Once a stillage holds a known quantity, counting stock stops being a matter of counting items. Four full barrier stillages in the yard is 200 barriers available without anyone touching one of them, and the same arithmetic runs on posts at 100 per stillage.

That answers the questions a yard gets asked every day: how much is available, how much is out on hire, how much is awaiting inspection, how much is damaged, and how many complete sets could go out on a truck this afternoon. Running inventory in stillage-sized groups makes stock movement legible and makes assembling a set for a new project faster.

None of it survives a loose capacity. A stillage marked as full but actually two barriers short turns the whole count into a guess, so a part-loaded unit has to be counted and marked as part-loaded.

Stillage enquiries go wrong at the description stage. "Suitable for lifting" can mean forklift entry only, "holds barriers" can mean a barrier length you do not run, and "stackable" can mean stackable to two units on level hardstanding. The checklist below is what to put to a supplier before the order goes in.

Checkpoint	What to confirm with the supplier	Why it matters
Steel construction	Frame strength matched to handling conditions and the weight of a full load	A stillage that flexes or racks under load damages the components it is meant to protect
Dimensions	Which components the unit is actually built for; a barrier stillage is a different design to a post stillage	Wrong dimensions waste space in the unit and make counting unreliable
Forklift entry points	Entry points that suit the forklifts or telehandlers you actually run	A stillage the yard cannot pick up is dead stock until something else turns up
Crane-lifting provision	Confirmed crane-lifting points, in writing	A forklift stillage is not automatically suitable for crane lifting
Stackability	Stated stacking limits, and suitable ground beneath the stack	Stacking beyond the manufacturer's limit, or on uneven ground, risks a collapse
Loading and unloading	Components go in and out without extra handling steps	Every extra handling step is another chance to drop or scratch a component
Component capacity	A defined number of barriers, posts or clamps per unit	Fixed capacity is what turns a full stillage into a stock count
Finish	Galvanized or coated finish rated for outdoor use	An uncoated stillage corrodes faster than the barriers inside it

The crane line is the one to hold hardest, because floor-to-floor lifting is exactly the moment somebody reaches for the nearest stillage regardless of what it was built for. Oakley is unambiguous on this:

"A forklift stillage should not automatically be assumed to be suitable for crane lifting."

Confirm the manufacturer's intended lifting method before the unit goes near a crane, and work to the site's lifting instructions. On the truck, a stillage gives you a predictable loading unit where loose barriers and posts shift in transit. How efficiently it loads depends on the barrier dimensions, the stillage size, the quantity, the vehicle and the weight restrictions, so treat that as a calculation for the specific job.

Ask for the barrier stillages, the post stillages and the accessory boxes at quantity stage, in the same enquiry as the mesh barriers, the posts, the slab clamps and the spares. At HERMEQ storage and handling gets planned alongside the Edge Protection system itself, because the barrier lengths and post sizes fix what the storage has to fit around.

It rarely happens that way. Attention goes on whatever forms the physical barrier at the edge, since that is what the standard governs and what gets specified first, and storage gets bought later in a hurry, after the first delivery arrives damaged or the first floor-to-floor lift turns into a scramble. By then the sizes are set and whatever stillage arrives has to work round decisions already taken.

The gap costs most where one system is reused across several floors, several project phases or a run of hire customers. Reusable equipment only earns its keep for as long as it stays in a condition to reuse, and that gets decided in the yard.