How often should a playground be inspected? The three levels in EN 1176-7

Ask this question in English and you will get a number very quickly, usually from a supplier's blog, and usually built on an American recommendation that does not apply in Europe. The honest answer is less tidy and more useful: EN 1176-7 does not give one interval for a playground. It gives three levels, and it expects the owner to set the rhythm of the first two.

Three levels, three different questions

The most common misunderstanding is that the three levels are the same round done with different amounts of care. They are not. They ask different questions, which is why a more frequent operational inspection cannot stand in for a routine visual one.

Routine visual inspection: frequent, quick, on the surface

This round looks for what has happened since the last one and can be seen. Broken glass in the sand, a cracked seat, a rope that has parted, wood chips kicked away at the foot of the slide, litter under a climbing frame, damage from the weekend.

The point of the routine visual inspection is that it is short enough to actually get done. A handful of items per piece of equipment, a few minutes in total. A round that takes an hour is a round that gets skipped.

Operational inspection: slower changes, closer look

Here you look at what changes slowly and cannot be seen from two metres away. Wear in bearings and fixings, movement in posts and foundations, chains and S-hooks that have worn thin, cracks in a slide bed, timber that has gone splintery, and the depth of the impact attenuating surfacing measured rather than glanced at.

This is the level Lekko is built around, together with the one above it. Both are meant to be done by the owner's own people, and both benefit from having the same list every time so that two different people produce the same round.

Annual main inspection: a job for a competent person

The annual main inspection goes further than anything you can do yourself. It covers structure and load-bearing parts, foundations that may have to be dug out to be judged, corrosion and rot below ground level, and measurements against the standard's dimensions. EN 1176-7 describes it as work for a competent person.

It also does something that is easy to miss: it tests whether your own routine is working. The person carrying it out will see whether last year's findings were closed, whether maintenance was done, and whether the routine exists in practice or only on paper. A site where the first two levels have been kept up produces a shorter and cheaper main inspection.

So what sets the interval?

The standard puts the judgement on the owner, because the owner is the only one who knows the site. These are the things that move it, and they move it in both directions.

• How hard the site is used. A day-care yard with thirty children and a courtyard with three are not in the same place on the scale.
• Materials and environment. Timber near the coast wears faster than steel inland. Salt, sun and frost all count.
• Moving parts. Swings, roundabouts and cableways need looking at more often than a fixed frame.
• Vandalism. Being close to a school, a bus stop or a bar pushes the interval down, not up.
• The season. Frost, thaw and a windy autumn change a site faster than a quiet summer week.
• The manufacturer's own instructions. Where they set a closer interval, they are the ones that apply.

What is not optional is that the judgement has been made and written down. An interval nobody wrote down is not an interval; it is an assumption, and it cannot be shown to anybody afterwards.

When an interval slips

Nothing dramatic happens, but it should be visible. A late inspection that is noticed and then carried out is a deviation in the routine. A late inspection that nobody noticed is a hole in the record, and a hole cannot be filled in afterwards without inventing something.

This is why due dates are worth counting per piece of equipment and per level, rather than as one date for the whole playground. A swing installed in March does not share an anniversary with the rest, and a list that pretends otherwise will be wrong about one of them.

Put it on a rhythm

Three levels, separate intervals, several pieces of equipment, and two or three people sharing the work — that combination is exactly what goes wrong in a spreadsheet. Lekko counts the next due date per item and per level, reminds you before it falls due, and puts the right checklist in front of whoever is holding the phone. See the checklist for what a round should contain.