The inspections a residential building cannot skip: a calendar for the community

Sooner or later every president opens a letter that says an inspection is due: the lift, the electrical installation, the extinguishers, the gas. Some of those letters quote a regulation and a date. Others come from a company selling the certificate it says the law demands. Telling one from the other is harder than it should be, because no single law lists the inspections a residential building owes: each installation has its own regulation, its own clock and its own inspector, and the Canary Islands add rules of their own on top.

This is the list for a community of owners on Fuerteventura, installation by installation: the rule, how often, and who signs the paper. It also names two things that appear on many checklists and have no official inspection at all.

The duty behind every date

The starting point is the Building Act: owners must conservar en buen estado la edificación mediante un adecuado uso y mantenimiento, keep the building in good condition through proper use and maintenance. The Technical Building Code turns that into three tasks: carry out the building's maintenance plan, record every repair in the building's book, and Realizar las inspecciones reglamentariamente establecidas y conservar su correspondiente documentación, carry out the inspections that the regulations establish and keep their documents.

In a block of flats the common installations belong to the community, so the duty falls on the community, and day to day on its administrator, whom the Horizontal Property Act tells to Atender a la conservación y entretenimiento de la casa, see to the conservation and upkeep of the house. When an inspection ends with a list of defects, the repairs are not put to a vote: works needed to conserve the building and its common installations are obligatory under article 10.1.a of that Act, and the meeting only decides how the levy is shared out and paid.

Two names recur in what follows. A maintenance company looks after an installation under contract, and for some installations the contract is itself compulsory. A control body (organismo de control, usually shortened to OCA) is an accredited, independent inspector that examines the installation every few years and issues a certificate. They are different companies with different jobs, and the inspector is chosen and booked by the community.

The calendar in one table

The periods below are the ones the regulations fix. The sections after the table explain where each threshold comes from and which buildings fall outside it.

The lift

The lift has the tightest regime, and we have written about it at length. Since 1 July 2024 the technical instruction approved by Royal Decree 355/2024 sets the periodic inspection at every four years for a lift in a building with more than twenty dwellings or serving more than four floors, every six years for any other residential lift, and every two years in industrial buildings and places of public concurrence. The community books it with a control body, and the instruction is blunt about who may not: La inspección periódica no podrá ser contratada en ningún caso por la empresa conservadora, the periodic inspection may in no case be contracted by the maintenance company. That company must, however, give the community at least three months' notice of the date, and it takes the lift out of service if the date passes without an inspection. What the inspector can write, and the upgrades that older lifts must receive, are in our piece on lifts after RD 355/2024.

Electricity: the ten-year inspection, and who owes it

The low-voltage regulation (REBT, Royal Decree 842/2002) reserves inspection by a control body for installations of special importance, and its instruction ITC-BT-05 puts the common installations of residential buildings among them. They are inspected cada 10 años, las comunes de edificios de viviendas de potencia total instalada superior a 100 kW, every 10 years, the common ones of residential buildings with a total installed power above 100 kW.

Few communities know their total installed power, and the Canary Government settled the question in a resolution of 16 November 2016. The power is counted at no less than 5,000 W per dwelling, plus the premises and everything else fed through the building's connection: garage, pool, stairs, pumps, gardens, lifts. The resolution then draws the practical line: En la práctica quedan incluidos aquellos edificios que dispongan de 20 o más suministros, entre viviendas y locales, in practice the buildings with 20 or more supplies, between dwellings and premises, are included. A building with that many supplies escapes only if it can prove a total installed power of 100 kW or less, and a smaller one whose documented power is higher is in as well.

What the inspector examines is the common part: the connection installations from the main protection box up to each owner's own installation, the general services (lighting of halls and stairs, the lifts' supply, pressure pumps) and the special areas attached to the building, such as pools, garages, outdoor lighting, gardens, generators and renewable installations. The flats themselves are not inspected.

The clock depends on the building's age. A building whose commissioning was filed after 18 September 2003, the day the regulation came into force, owes its first inspection at ten years and another every ten years after that. Older buildings were given fixed dates between 18 September 2006 and 18 September 2009, the oldest first. A block from the eighties that has never been inspected is therefore not waiting for its date: it is overdue. Where no documents survive, the age is taken from the date of the first electricity supply or, failing that, from the habitability certificate or the municipal licence.

The community requests the inspection itself, from a control body libremente elegido por el titular de la instalación, freely chosen by the holder of the installation. The certificate is favourable, conditional or negative. A serious defect gives a conditional certificate and a deadline of no more than six months; the repair is done by an authorised electrical installer, who certifies it once the defects are corrected, and the papers are filed with the Canary Government's industry department. A very serious defect gives a negative certificate that goes to the department at once, and an installation that is an imminent danger can be disconnected.

Some parts of the building have a shorter clock. Under the same instruction, the installations that needed an inspection before they were first used are inspected again every five years, and three of them are common in residential complexes: the garage, the pool with more than 10 kW of installed power and outdoor lighting above 5 kW. For garages the state text exempts only the small ones, excepto aparcamientos o estacionamientos de menos de 25 plazas, except car parks of fewer than 25 spaces, while the table in the Canary decree sets the line at more than 25 spaces; at exactly that number, ask the control body. Charging stations for electric vehicles join the list only when the installation required an engineering project; an owner's own charger is the subject of our piece on EV chargers in community garages. The Canary resolution asks that the five-year inspections be made to coincide with the ten-year one where possible.

Two more Canary rules are worth knowing. A company that maintains the electrical installation under contract must tell the community, one month ahead and in a way that leaves proof, that the inspection is due, and must report to the Government the installations that are three months past their date. The decree's table makes such a contract compulsory only where the garage exceeds 5,000 m²; a community without one gets no reminder, so the date has to be in its own calendar. And whoever applies for public money for energy improvements has to show that the periodic inspection has been done. A complex with its own transformer station has one more date, since medium- and high-voltage installations are inspected at least every three years.

Fire protection: maintenance always, an inspection only for the larger garage

Fire equipment follows the regulation approved by Royal Decree 513/2017, which separates two things that are often confused. Maintenance is owed by every building that has the equipment. Annex II fixes the longest time allowed between operations: extinguishers are checked every three months and serviced every year, with a pressure test every five years; hose reels are checked every three months and serviced every year and every five years, and their hoses are replaced at least every twenty years; dry risers are checked every six months and tested every five years; alarm and detection systems are checked every three months and tested every year. The three- and six-monthly checks may be done by the community's own staff. The yearly and five-yearly operations belong to an authorised maintenance company, and the signed records must be kept for at least five years.

The inspection by a control body is another matter. Article 22 orders one at least every ten years and then exempts, among others, establishments of Uso residencial vivienda, residential housing use, and of Uso aparcamiento con superficie construida menor de 500 m2, car-park use with a built area under 500 m2, as long as they contain no high special-risk or storage areas. Nor is it required where the only equipment is extinguishers and the like, or emergency lighting. A block of flats with extinguishers on the landings therefore owes maintenance and no inspection. A garage of 500 m² or more with hose reels or an alarm is, as we read the article, outside the exemption: the Building Code treats a garage of more than 100 m² as a use of its own and a separate fire sector, and the housing exemption does not reach it. That is our reading, and the control body will confirm it for a given garage. For installations that already existed when the regulation came into force on 12 December 2017, the first inspection fell due ten years after they were put into service, and those already older than that were given between one and three years.

Gas

The gas regulation (Royal Decree 919/2006) distinguishes installations fed from a distribution network from those fed from bottles or from a tank of their own. Where the building is connected to a network, the receiving installations are inspected every five years by the distributor or by an authorised gas installer, the common part included; the distributor must give three months' notice, and the cost is passed on to the user. Where there is no network, it is the holder who must commission a revision every five years from an authorised gas installer.

A communal LPG tank adds three duties of its own: a maintenance contract with an installer that runs a permanent emergency service, a revision of the tank at the same time as the five-yearly one of the installation it feeds, and a pressure test every fifteen years, which the community commissions from a control body. The sanction is built into the supply: No podrá suministrarse GLP a ninguna instalación, si el titular no acredita ante el suministrador la realización de las revisiones indicadas en esta ITC, no LPG may be supplied to any installation if the holder does not prove to the supplier that the revisions set out in this instruction have been carried out. The installation inside each flat is its owner's or occupier's to revise, on the same five-year clock.

Hot water, solar panels and air conditioning

Thermal installations, meaning heating, cooling, ventilation and hot water, follow the RITE (Royal Decree 1027/2007), and almost everything in it turns on one figure: 70 kW of installed thermal power. Above it, the community must have a maintenance contract with an authorised company, which signs a maintenance certificate every year; the heat or cold generators are inspected for energy efficiency every four years by an accredited independent inspector of the community's choice; and once the installation is more than fifteen years old the whole of it is inspected, and again every fifteen years.

From 5 kW up to 70 kW there is no official inspection, but maintenance is still done by an authorised company following the installation's manual, at intervals the regulation sets as minimums: solar thermal panels at least once a year, for example. In a residential complex the installations that reach these rules are central hot water, solar panels on the roof, a heated pool or central air conditioning.

Water: the tank and the pool

The tank that many buildings keep between the meter and the flats has no inspector, but it has a rule that names the community. The 2023 drinking-water decree says that the owner of the building, or the community, deberá limpiar periódicamente el depósito interior incluyendo desincrustación, desinfección y aclarado, must periodically clean the internal tank, including descaling, disinfection and rinsing, through a professional, at a frequency assessed with the town hall's criteria according to the water and the size of the tank. The legionella decree, which governs cooling towers and spa pools, leaves out installations in edificios dedicados al uso exclusivo de vivienda, buildings used exclusively as housing, provided they do not affect the exterior environment. Our piece on water on Fuerteventura covers the tank, the pump and the bill.

The pool is a health matter rather than an industrial one, and its controls are the community's own to keep. The Canary pool regulation wants the water read 2 veces al día: apertura y máxima afluencia, 2 times a day: at opening and at peak attendance, every day the pool is open, with the results in the pool's log book, and the showers cleaned, descaled and disinfected against legionella at least once a year. Its electrical installation, above 10 kW, is the five-year item of the electricity section. The lifeguard, the registry and the laboratory analyses are in our piece on community pools.

The building itself

The technical inspection of the building, the ITE, is the date most owners have heard of and, for most buildings, the one furthest away. The Canary land law lets the administration require owners to prove the state of conservation of their building through an inspection that deberá ser realizada por técnico competente y tendrá una eficacia de veinte años, must be carried out by a competent technician and is valid for twenty years. It applies to collective residential buildings that were eighty years old or more on 30 June 2018, and to the rest as they reach eighty. A block finished in 1990 reaches that age in 2070. Our piece on the building's health and the ITE has the detail.

Two things with no official inspection

Two items appear on many maintenance offers as if a law demanded a certificate for them. None does.

• The lightning rod. The Building Code decides whether a building needs lightning protection at all, by comparing the expected frequency of strikes with the acceptable risk, and it sets no periodic inspection for the system. It is maintained like any other part of the building, under the building's maintenance plan.
• The garage door. The Ministry of Industry's report on these doors is clear about who answers for them: El propietario de la puerta es el responsable legal de que ésta sea mantenida adecuadamente, the owner of the door is legally responsible for its being properly maintained, and in a building under horizontal property that owner is the community. Maintenance follows the manufacturer's instructions, in most cases needs a professional and is written down in the door's maintenance book. No control body inspects it.

When a letter says a certificate is compulsory, ask for the article. Every inspection in this piece has one.

A worked example

Take a complex in Corralejo finished in 2008: thirty-two flats and two shops, one lift serving five floors, an underground garage of forty spaces and 1,100 m², a pool whose pumps and lighting add up to 12 kW, hose reels and an alarm in the garage, extinguishers on every landing, solar panels for hot water and a water tank with a pump group.

The lift is inspected every four years, because the building has more than twenty dwellings. With thirty-four supplies, the common electrical installation is inspected every ten years: in 2018 and again in 2028. The garage and the pool are on the five-year electrical clock, and the community asks the control body to combine them with the ten-year visit when the years coincide. The fire equipment has its quarterly, yearly and five-yearly maintenance, and the garage, at more than 500 m², has on our reading its own inspection by a control body every ten years. The solar panels are serviced at least once a year by an authorised company, and the tank is cleaned at the interval the town hall's criteria indicate. The ITE is not due until 2088.

What a missed date costs

The Industry Act lists among its serious infringements Mantener en funcionamiento instalaciones sin haber superado favorablemente las inspecciones, revisiones o comprobaciones, keeping installations in operation without having passed the inspections, revisions or checks, and also having no maintenance contract where one is compulsory. Failing to correct in time the defects an inspection found is a minor one. The ceilings are far above anything a community would see, up to 60,000 euros for a minor infringement and up to 6,000,000 for a serious one, and the actual fine is graded by the damage, the intent and the means of the offender; but the Canary resolution on electrical inspections refers expressly to these sanctions.

The practical costs arrive sooner. A lift whose inspection is overdue is taken out of service. A gas tank without its revisions is not refilled. An electrical installation that is an imminent danger can be disconnected. A community that wants a grant for energy works must show its inspection done. And the repairs an inspection demands are obligatory works, paid by all the owners by quota, with a deadline counted in months.

A checklist for the board

• List what the building has. Lift, number of flats and premises, garage spaces and built area, the pool's installed power, gas tank, central hot water or solar panels, water tank, fire equipment. Every threshold in this piece is one of those figures.
• Find the commissioning dates. Each clock starts when the installation was put into service or last inspected. The documents are in the community's file or with the maintenance company; where none survive, the date of the first electricity supply serves.
• Ask every maintenance company for its dates in writing. The lift company owes three months' notice; an electrical maintainer, where the community has one under contract, owes one month.
• Book the control body yourselves. It is chosen by the community, and for the lift the maintenance company is barred from contracting it.
• Budget the corrections, not only the inspection. Serious defects come with a deadline of no more than six months, and the works are obligatory.
• Keep the certificates. The Canary decree makes the holder keep the electrical installation's technical and administrative documents for its whole life, and fire maintenance records are kept for at least five years.

What we do in the communities we administer

In the communities we administer, a maintenance calendar is set in the first 90 days and reviewed every year: pools, lifts, façades, gardens and water systems, each with its season and its budget line, agreed with the community. The dates in this piece belong on that calendar, next to the maintenance they follow. When an inspection ends in works, significant jobs go to the community with three comparable quotes, and the invoice is paid when the work matches the quote, checked in person. The certificates are kept with the community's documents, under the same login as the minutes. Owners who want their building run that way can read about community maintenance and ask for a quote.

Common questions

Does every building need the ten-year electrical inspection?

Only buildings whose common installations exceed 100 kW of total installed power. In the Canaries that means, in practice, every building with 20 or more supplies between flats and premises, unless it can prove 100 kW or less. Buildings commissioned after 18 September 2003 owe the first inspection at ten years; older ones had deadlines between 2006 and 2009.

Who chooses the inspector, and who pays?

The community chooses, among the accredited control bodies; for the lift, the maintenance company is expressly barred from contracting the inspection. The fee is a general expense shared by quota, and so are the works the certificate demands, which are obligatory and need no vote.

Do the extinguishers need an official inspection?

Not in a residential building: the fire regulation exempts housing use from the ten-year inspection by a control body. They do need maintenance: a check every three months, a service every year by an authorised company and a pressure test every five years. A garage of 500 m² or more with hose reels or an alarm is, on our reading, a different case.

Is our building due for an ITE?

In the Canaries the inspection applies to collective residential buildings that were eighty years old on 30 June 2018 and to the rest as they reach eighty; once done, it is valid for twenty years. A block built in the eighties or later is decades away from it, although the administration can still order repairs where safety demands them.