The Importance of a Building Inspection Checklist
A building inspection checklist is a simple tool that helps keep buildings compliant with regulations. It can help reduce costly repairs or structural failures by identifying problems early.
Keeping a building in compliance with regulations requires constant attention from building management teams. It also requires an excellent tool to track issues and report on them.
Building Data Analysis
A building inspection checklist is an essential tool for assessing the condition of a property and identifying potential problems. This is particularly important if you are a landlord, homeowner or commercial property owner, as it can help you avoid costly repairs in the future by catching issues that may otherwise be overlooked. Additionally, an inspection can demonstrate compliance with building standards and prevent health and safety hazards.
Building inspection software is an alternative to traditional paper-based inspection forms and can be a more efficient way of managing this process. It provides an online platform that can be accessed from any internet-enabled device, including smartphones and tablets, ensuring that all inspection data is stored securely and is easily accessible when required. Additionally, inspection results can be instantly transformed into formal reports and shared with relevant parties.
The best building inspection software should include a full suite of pre-defined quality control, fire, safety and COSHH templates that are easy to use. It should also offer a comprehensive list of features that allow businesses to improve efficiency and meet regulatory requirements such as those set out in Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
A comprehensive checklist should cover all aspects of a workplace, including people, environment, equipment, and materials. These include physical hazards caused by abrasion, impact, vibration, heat, cold, radiation, pressure, combustible dust and fumes, odours and indoor air quality. Ergonomic hazards can also occur in the workplace, and these are caused by poorly designed workstations, tools or machinery that place physiological (repetitive movements, awkward postures) or psychosocial (workload, time pressure) demands on employees.
A building inspection checklist should assess the structure and external environment of the premises and look at drainage, roofs, windows and doors, foundation walls and basements, fire-fighting, and sprinkler systems. It should also check electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems to ensure they work correctly. In addition, the ground should be graded to ensure that rainwater drains away from the premises and not towards the building.
Incorporate Building Standards
Building standards into your checklist will ensure your inspection team doesn’t miss anything. Local governing bodies typically set these. They also may be based on industry guidelines and practices. Incorporating these into your inspection checklists will help ensure the building meets essential safety and quality standards, which may avoid penalties and legal issues.
All buildings deteriorate over time due to weathering and wear and tear. Regular building inspections will identify areas of the structure that need repair or replacement before the failure of those parts leads to costly damage and disruption to your business. For example, the accumulated effects of hot sun, rain, dust and winter snow will eventually weather even the highest quality masonry walls and siding. This weathering results in the breakdown of the natural finishes on the wall surface, such as peeling and blistering paint, a loss of the protective mortar joint and cracks in the masonry.
A failure to address these issues before they become significant problems can cost a company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs, lost revenue and loss of productivity. A well-designed inspection checklist will identify these types of failures before they have a chance to become more serious.
Your building inspection checklist should include information about the building, such as its address and owner’s name, and the most recent inspection date. It should also contain the inspection type. This information will allow you to locate the building in your inspection database quickly.
Generally, your checklist will need to cover a broad range of items, from general building inspection items like identifying structural issues and the presence of pests and moulds to specialised inspections that include water testing, asbestos sampling, cores of roofs and floors, fire alarms, elevators and escalators, wood destroying organism inspections and radon gas testing. Your inspection checklist must be flexible and customisable to suit your organisation’s needs. You can create an inspection checklist specific for residential properties, office buildings, commercial property or apartment complexes, manufacturing facilities or hospitals.
Incorporate Utility Services
While building inspections are critical to ensuring that facilities remain in tip-top shape, they’re often pushed to the side because of the day-to-day demands of initiating work orders, ordering supplies and ensuring that operational efficiency consistently improves quarter over quarter. If left unattended, the nitty gritty issues that need attention can become major headaches if they’re not detected and addressed quickly.