Gas Safety in Hotels – What Happens After the Service?
Gas Safety in Hotels – What Happens After the Service?
When everything is working properly, gas equipment tends to sit quietly in the background.
The heating comes on, there is hot water in the bedrooms and the kitchen gets through service.
Then the annual service comes around and gas safety suddenly gets everyone's attention again.
Routine servicing and safety checks are important, but gas safety in hotels should not begin and end with the engineer's visit.
Know what you have in the building
Depending on the property, a hotel could have boilers, water heaters, commercial kitchen appliances, gas fires and other equipment.
Someone within the management or maintenance team should have a reasonable idea of what is installed and how it is maintained.
That does not mean the hotel manager needs to understand how to repair a commercial boiler.
It means they should be able to find the relevant service information and see whether the contractor raised anything requiring attention.
Read the report afterwards
This is the bit that can easily disappear amongst everything else going on in a hotel.
The contractor attends, completes the work and sends the paperwork.
If the report contains a recommendation or identifies further work, somebody needs to make sure that happens.
Otherwise you can end up with an impressive collection of certificates while still having work sitting outstanding.
Gas safety works better when it forms part of the wider hotel maintenance and building compliance system.
Staff can notice changes
People using equipment every day become familiar with how it normally operates.
Kitchen staff might notice a burner behaving differently. Someone could hear an unusual noise, notice an alarm or become concerned about something around a plant room.
Their job is not to investigate gas equipment themselves.
They need to know who to contact and when to stop using something.
Staff also need to understand your arrangements for carbon monoxide and what they should do if an alarm activates.
The middle of a night shift is not a good time for somebody to discover that nobody has explained the procedure.
Hotels across Cumbria, the Lake District, Dumfries and Galloway and the wider south of Scotland can also have older buildings that have changed considerably over time.
Heating systems are replaced, kitchens move and extensions are added.
Every so often, it is worth looking at the property as a whole rather than simply thinking about the next annual service.
Good gas safety is about using competent people, maintaining the equipment properly and making sure anything identified during an inspection is followed through.
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