LOLER, F-Gas and fixed wire testing: a practical FM compliance calendar

Why these three keep coming up together

LOLER, F-Gas and fixed wire testing aren't related regimes — they come from different legislation and cover completely different equipment — but they land on the same desk because they're the statutory checks that touch almost every commercial building's plant: lifting equipment (hoists, lifts, lifting accessories), refrigeration and air conditioning (chillers, AC units, cold rooms) and the fixed electrical installation itself. Missing any one of them is both a safety issue and, for LOLER and fixed wire in particular, a duty that an insurer or an HSE inspector will ask about directly after an incident.

LOLER — lifting equipment

The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 apply to any equipment used at work for lifting or lowering loads, including accessories like slings and shackles. The core duty is thorough examination by a competent person, at intervals set by risk:

• Equipment lifting people (passenger lifts, MEWPs) — every 6 months.
• Lifting accessories (chains, slings, shackles) — every 6 months.
• Other lifting equipment (goods hoists, cranes) — every 12 months, unless a written examination scheme set by the competent person specifies otherwise.

A thorough examination is not the same as routine maintenance — it's a formal inspection producing a report of thorough examination, which must record any defect that is or could become a danger, with a deadline for repair. Defects that present an immediate danger must be reported to the enforcing authority (usually the HSE) as well as the equipment's owner. Reports must be kept until the next one is due, or for two years, whichever is longer — and for equipment lifting people, the previous report should generally be kept for the life of the equipment.

F-Gas — refrigerant leak checks

The UK F-Gas Regulations control fluorinated greenhouse gases used as refrigerants in air conditioning, refrigeration and heat pump systems. The leak-check frequency is driven by the equipment's CO2-equivalent (CO2e) charge, not a flat interval:

Systems below 5 tonnes CO2e are generally exempt from mandatory leak checks (hermetically sealed systems below a higher threshold have separate rules). Checks must be carried out by an F-Gas certified engineer, and every system requiring leak checks needs an up-to-date equipment register recording the refrigerant type and quantity, the CO2e calculation, leak check dates and results, and any refrigerant added or recovered — records that must be kept for at least 5 years. The CO2e figure matters more than most FM teams realise: the same physical charge of a higher-GWP refrigerant can cross a threshold that a lower-GWP alternative wouldn't, changing the required check frequency entirely.

Fixed wire testing — the EICR

The fixed electrical installation itself is covered separately from portable appliances (PAT) — see our certificate-integrity guide for how test records should be structured. An Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) assesses the fixed wiring, distribution boards and protective devices, with recommended intervals that vary by premises type:

• Commercial and industrial premises — typically every 5 years, or at a change of occupancy.
• Rented residential (England, PRS 2020 duty) — a statutory maximum of 5 years, with remedial work required within 28 days of an Unsatisfactory report.
• Higher-risk premises (public buildings with high footfall, leisure/swimming facilities, agricultural) — often 1–3 years.

Observations are coded C1 (danger present), C2 (potentially dangerous), C3 (improvement recommended) and FI (further investigation) — any C1, C2 or FI makes the report Unsatisfactory overall. An FM team managing a multi-site estate should track the report outcome and any Unsatisfactory remedial deadline as its own due date, separate from the next scheduled EICR — the two are easy to conflate but carry very different urgency.

Building a register that survives an audit

All three regimes share the same underlying requirement: a defensible record of what was checked, when, by whom, with what result, and when it's next due. The failure mode that catches FM teams out isn't ignorance of the rules — it's a register split across contractor PDFs, an old spreadsheet and someone's inbox, where nobody can say with confidence which assets are actually in date. Structuring by asset rather than by regime helps: each lift, AC unit and distribution board carries its own next-due date, visible at the point the engineer is standing in front of it, rather than buried in a compliance spreadsheet nobody opens between audits. A tool that lets you scan an asset's tag and see its current interval and next-due date on the spot — as with AssetIQ's per-asset compliance and service-date fields — turns "is this in date?" from a desk-based spreadsheet search into a five-second check on site. For estates running multiple overlapping schedules per asset (say, a chiller needing both LOLER-adjacent lifting-accessory checks and F-Gas leak checks), a single next-due field per asset covers the simpler cases well; a genuinely multi-task PPM schedule for equipment with several independent regimes is worth planning for separately as an estate grows.

Common failures

1. Treating F-Gas leak check frequency as fixed, when it actually depends on the CO2e charge — a refrigerant swap can silently change the required interval.
2. Confusing a LOLER thorough examination with routine planned maintenance — they are not interchangeable and don't satisfy each other's duty.
3. Losing track of an EICR's remedial deadline separately from its next full re-inspection date.
4. No named competent person or contractor on record for each regime — an auditor will ask who certified the check, not just that it happened.
5. Records held only by the contractor, not the client — if the contractor changes, the history goes with them.

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or compliance advice. Rules change — always check the current official guidance for your situation.