Maintenance

Any equipment needs to be checked and maintained. Playground equipment, in particular, given also the users, requires careful monitoring and periodic checks, critical to maintaining the efficiency of the equipment and to extending the service life of the product.

 

Maintenance is key to children safety, so much that technical standard EN 1176 has an entire section dedicated to maintenance, the 7^th part of the standard, because the only responsible party of the service is the owner or the manager of the area.

 

The accidents that occur each day in playgrounds are noteworthy, some are even fatal, and often these are caused by negligence or by superficiality of managers to carry out maintenance. Sometimes the manager appears unprepared about the measures to be taken in a playground, which is why it requires the presence of specialized subjects for that purpose. In all cases of claims where there isn’t a proven maintenance plan adopted, the manager is at fault and therefore responsible for the accident.

 

According to the EN 1176 standard, part 7, the following maintenance works are necessary:

- PERIODIC VISUAL INSPECTION: it is a daily visual control of the game and of the area in general, in order to verify and remove improper situations, caused by vandalism or weather, such as:

 

- ROUTINE MAINTENANCE: in the standard there is a reference to a FUNCTIONAL INSPECTION, that is a more in-depth check than the daily visual inspection; this check has to be done carefully during the first two months after installation, because equipment, depending also on the weather conditions, can undergo deformations, changes or shrinkage, in particular for wooden equipment.

- ANNUAL MAIN OR CORRECTIVE MAINTENACE: it’s a thorough and complete inspection of the game, which has to be performed every year, which includes also a check of the state of foundations, to verify if there is land subsidence or any irregularity of the plinths, of the general conditions of the equipment and of the seal of the surfaces of bump absorption. Such maintenance requires the replacement of any damaged or worn parts, and the restoration of the security of the impact area.

 

Green Arreda Ltd recommends these controls to be run on a daily basis. Frequency of inspections depends on the location of the game and on the number of its users. It is known that public areas that are not subject to surveillance need more inspections. It is important to have a greater control in areas subject to high stress conditions, such as saline environments and particularly humid sites. The buyer is responsible for controls and maintenance operations. The non-enforcement of these controls can have serious implications for users, and consequences, including criminal penalties for the managers/leaders of the equipment.

 

While any manager can carry out personally the first two controls, for the major annual inspection people qualified as experts according the European standard EN 1176 must intervene.

 

 

For each realised or maintained playground Green Arreda has a folder, which is delivered to the customer together with the invoice, documenting all the works that have been carried out, together with photographs, made by an expert on security of playgrounds. For every new park that we realise, our company provides the appropriate documentation of all interventions that have to be performed on equipment.

 

This documentation will be useful to the customer even in case of accidents in the area, to prove their attention to this problem and to prove that checks have been made.

 

 

EXAMPLE OF EXTRAORDINARY MAINTENANCE: