Rope adventure climbing courses are a growing leisure activity all over the world with major chains such as Go Ape growing into a worldwide operation.
In many cases, the climbing courses rely on wooden poles to provide structural support. Obviously, this is a safety-critical application and annual insurance inspections have been highlighting problems with ground line decay in many poles installed over the last 10 years. This has led to Polesaver becoming virtually standard fit on all new poles and also widespread use as a retrofit on poles in service that have not started to decay.
Many of the poles used on these installations are very large and costly. A recent installation used 50 poles that are over 50 feet (15 meters) long and 24” or 60cm ground line diameter weighing over 2.5 tonnes each, all these poles being protected with Polesaver sleeves for 60cm diameter poles.