Is your smoke control system being serviced by a Competent Maintainer?

Ensuring building smoke control systems are regularly and properly serviced and maintained is both essential for effective fire safety and a key legal obligation for facilities managers and building owners. A good way to make sure that you meet the requirements is by signing up to a service contract with a specialist provider. However, not all service contracts are the same. Before signing, it is important to check that the organisation has the skills, knowledge and training to carry out both inspection and maintenance/repair works themselves.

To help building owners and facilities managers to understand the requirements for smoke control maintenance, and who should carry out work on systems, the Smoke Control Association (SCA) has published Guidance on Maintenance of Smoke Control Equipment. This guide provides an overview of the key legal obligations for building owners and managers along with advice on how to identify smoke control assets and suggested maintenance and inspection schedules.

To ensure all servicing works are carried out correctly and by properly qualified individuals, this best practice guide defines a new role — Competent Maintainer. The SCA guidance views this role as being separate from that of the Competent Person defined in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO) and it is important to understand how these differ.

What is the difference between a Competent Maintainer and a Competent Person for Smoke Control Systems?

The SCA guidance defines a Competent Maintainer as a “maintenance organisation having appropriate training, skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours suitable for undertaking maintenance of smoke control systems”. To ensure they meet these requirements, it recommends that the organisation is certified under the IFCC SDI 19 scheme for maintenance activities.

In contrast, the SCA guidance defines the Competent Person as an individual who has sufficient training, experience and knowledge of smoke control systems in general, and the layout within the building itself in particular, in order to be able to adequately undertake inspections of the systems as required. Critically, a Competent Person may therefore not have the skills to actually carry out any maintenance work that is required.

Is your service contract carried out by a Competent Maintainer?

When signing up to a service contract for a building smoke control system, it is important to check that the organisation meets the definition of a Competent Maintainer, and to confirm that they have the in-house engineering capacity and expertise to carry out any maintenance and repair works themselves.

In some cases, companies may offer service contracts, but their inspection staff will only meet the requirements of a Competent Person. This allows them to carry out the regular inspection works. However, where maintenance is required, this work may then have to be contracted out to a separate third party.

For building owners and facilities managers, this can mean that works on critical building safety systems — for which you have ultimate responsibility — are being carried out by a third party you have no existing relationship with. This places additional responsibility on you to ensure that they are suitably qualified and that works have been completed and documented correctly. It can also significantly raise the cost of the maintenance work as third parties will charge on a job-by-job basis and your actual service contract provider may charge an additional mark-up fee on top of this.

Your Colt Service Contract

At Colt, we believe it is essential that your service contract engineers have the knowledge and experience to not only carry out regular inspection work but also any maintenance and repair works that may be required. We were the first company in the UK to be certified to both IFC SDI 19 & SDI 05, meeting the requirements of a Competent Maintainer, and we ensure our engineers have the training and skills to carry out preventative maintenance on any system, regardless of who manufactured the components.

Each Colt service contract is tailored to the building we are working on and where possible, we look to assign the same engineer to you for every visit. This means you can have real confidence that the works are being carried out by a competent engineer who has a clear understanding of your building’s smoke control system. Our engineers also have access to our extensive spare part library. This allows any maintenance and repair works to be carried out quickly and efficiently. In addition, as all of this work is carried out by our staff, we can make sure that the works are priced fairly and that there are no nasty surprises, should maintenance be needed.

To discuss your requirements, contact our Service and Maintenance team.