If you manage a building, the electrical side of compliance has a habit of being invisible right up until it is not. Everything works, nobody complains, and then an insurer asks for a certificate, or a fire officer asks when the emergency lighting was last tested, and suddenly you are digging through three years of email trying to find out who did what and when.
Most facility managers we work with are not unclear on whether the work needs doing. They are unclear on how often, what evidence they need to hold, and where their responsibility ends and a contractor's begins. So here is a straightforward run through.
Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act and the General Application Regulations, the duty sits with the employer or the person in control of the workplace to ensure electrical installations and equipment are safe and maintained in a safe condition. In practice that responsibility lands on whoever manages the building day to day, which is usually you.
That matters because it is a duty to maintain safety on an ongoing basis, not a duty to have had something installed correctly once. A certificate from the original fit out does not discharge it. Neither does a contractor's assurance that everything looked grand.
The other thing worth knowing is that in a multi-tenant building the line between landlord and tenant responsibility is frequently assumed rather than documented. Common areas, risers, and main distribution usually sit with the landlord or managing agent, while tenant equipment sits with the tenant. If your lease does not spell it out, that ambiguity tends to surface at the worst possible moment.
This is the full examination of the fixed wiring: distribution boards, circuits, protective devices, earthing and bonding. It produces a report that identifies anything that is unsafe, deteriorating, or non compliant, graded by urgency.
How often depends on the building type and how hard the installation is worked. An office is inspected less frequently than an industrial unit or a kitchen. The inspecting contractor should set the next inspection date on the report itself based on what they found, so that date is your calendar entry.
If your building has never had one, or you cannot find the last report, treat that as the starting point rather than something to schedule for next year.
Anything that plugs in. Kettles, monitors, extension leads, chargers, cleaning equipment, portable heaters. The frequency depends on the equipment and the environment: a desktop monitor in an office is low risk, a power tool or a floor scrubber is not.
The two things that catch people out here are the items nobody owns and the items nobody sees. Staff bringing in their own heaters and fans, and equipment stored in a cupboard between uses, both tend to fall outside whatever register you are keeping.
Emergency lighting requires regular functional testing along with a longer duration test annually to confirm the batteries still hold up for their rated period. This is the one that fire officers and insurers ask about most often, and it is also the one most likely to have quietly degraded, because a failed emergency fitting looks identical to a working one until the power goes out.
Regular servicing by a competent contractor, with a log kept on site. Again, the log matters as much as the service.
An inspection you cannot evidence is, for most practical purposes, an inspection that did not happen. When an insurer, auditor or fire officer asks, they are asking for documents.
What you want to be able to produce without a search:
That last one is the gap we see most often. Work gets done reactively over the course of a year, a new circuit here, a board change there, and the certificates end up scattered across individual emails rather than filed with the building records. Ask for certification at the point of completion, every time, and file it in one place.
If you have inherited a building and you are not sure where you stand, this is the order we would go in:
The last point sounds trivial and is not. Almost every compliance failure we see is a scheduling failure rather than a knowledge failure.
There is a real cost argument here beyond compliance. Reactive electrical work is expensive because it happens at short notice, often out of hours, and usually at the point where something has already failed. Planned maintenance moves the same work into scheduled visits, spreads it across the year, and catches problems while they are still small.
It also makes budgeting far easier, which tends to matter to whoever you report to more than the regulations do.
TAM Services have been looking after commercial and industrial buildings across Dublin for over thirty years. We are Safe Electric registered and NSAI certified, and we handle periodic inspections, PAT testing and planned maintenance contracts with minimal disruption to the working day.
Get in touch and we will talk through what your building needs.
