Ventia’s City of Sydney team is employing Innovative technology to help preserve our built heritage and invest in our people’s future by keeping them safe.  

The team has adopted SkyVac, a powerful yet compact vacuum cleaning device with a super-long reach that allows maintenance crews to clean roofs and guttering on three-storey buildings from the ground.

This simple yet highly effective tool was initially developed to improve worker safety, but it has also augmented our ability to maintain Sydney’s most historic public buildings.

SHEQ Manager for Local Government Adrian Mafrici said the system was a potential game-changer for Ventia’s many facilities maintenance (FM) operations.

“It was initially proposed by our Workplace Health & Safety Committee as a safety initiative, but it’s quickly proven to be so much more,” Adrian said.

“Rather than having to kit up for rooftop work with harnesses and have a two-person team, a single staff member can do it from the footpath without any working-at-height risk."

“The initiative represents a ‘below the line’ control where we literally remove the worker from the risky situation.”

The initiative represents a ‘below the line’ control where we literally remove the worker from the risky situation.

General Manager Local Government Katie James said not only did SkyVac improve worker safety, it made this important maintenance task quicker and more effective, our teams more productive, and eliminated paperwork associated with working at heights compliance.

“All of this adds up to significant cost savings for Ventia and our clients,” Katie said.

“It also means we can clean areas we’ve never been able to before, eliminating the working from heights risk altogether for these activities."

“At Alexandria Town Hall, we were able to clean gutters we hadn’t previously been able to reach, even when undertaking roof-level operations using harnesses.

“In addition to safely removing decades of leaf litter and mud we extracted a metre-high tree that was growing in it!"

All of this adds up to significant cost savings for Ventia and our clients

“The cleaning head is equipped with a high-definition live-feed camera so we can identify existing and future problems that we just wouldn’t be able to do with a standard rooftop -operated device.

“The 250 buildings we look after for the City of Sydney are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the thousands of low-rise public buildings Ventia manages across Australia and New Zealand.”

Watch the SkyVac in action below!