Most effective way of getting rid of ivy

[sime42]

Mewp or base anchor SRT and then tip tie in and work down.
What I tend to do is cut down one or two sides keeping a straight line to the bottom with a 2511 or 150, some thing with an accurate but none aggressive cut for around branches or unions but trying to keep the cutting to an absolute minimum so it peels off like a banana skin in one or two big sheets , if you can get ground crew to pull with hooks and rods when it gets to the really thick stuff at the bottom even better ..... then it can be dragged to the chipper in big lumps instead of a million little bits to be cut in to straight strips to make it easy to feed in.
This one on Friday took about 10 mins to strip off

... granted it was a fell so you didn’t have to be cautious about damaging the cambium but it went right in too the last few meters of the crown...
The worse I’ve done is spending a day and a half on a large multi stemmed ash but was well worth the effort and better results than any reduction or thin..
If the clients happy to look at a load of dead and constantly falling crap for years by all means remove a strip from the base and walk away though!

Thanks for the insights. Sounds like you've got an effective strategy going on there. You obviously operate on a much larger scale than I do. I don't climb on SRT, yet, but I could probably use the Big Shot to make the DRT easier on ivy clad trees. As mentioned by@htb.
Whichever way you achieve it, it's certainly very satisfying to get the bloody stuff off the tree in big sheets, rather than annoying little bits.
I had a customer once who kept some of those sheets and cleaned them up, finished them and kept them as a once living sculpture kind of thing. Looked really nice, the way all the strands intertwined.

[Marc Lewis]

Or whack yer spikes on and climb right over the annoying stuff.