Reactive maintenance: how to run it well in an Irish building, and keep it in proportion

01

What reactive maintenance is, and the duty behind it

Reactive maintenance, or unplanned maintenance, is the work done after something goes wrong: a leaking pipe in a toilet block, a boiler that will not fire on a Monday morning, a failed door closer, a light out on a stairwell. The Health and Safety Authority's information sheet on maintenance describes corrective maintenance, "also known as reactive maintenance", as work done "to restore a system or machine from a failed state to a working state", and preventive or planned maintenance as work at set intervals or to prescribed criteria, to reduce the probability of failure. The standard terms are in the European maintenance vocabulary, published in Ireland by NSAI as I.S. EN 13306:2017 Maintenance – Maintenance terminology.

Reactive work is one of several maintenance strategies. It sits beside planned preventative maintenance (servicing and testing on a schedule) and condition-based or predictive maintenance (work triggered by signs that an asset is deteriorating). Its most urgent form is emergency maintenance, where a fault creates an immediate risk to people, the building or its security. Run to failure is a deliberate choice to let a cheap, non-critical item fail and replace it then: a light in a store room, never a fire alarm panel.

The duty behind it is the general duty to maintain. Under section 8 of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, an employer must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, "the design, provision and maintenance" of the place of work "in a condition that is safe and without risk to health". Landlords and managing agents are caught too: under section 15 of the 2005 Act, a person with control of a non-domestic place of work used by others, or with an obligation under a contract, tenancy or licence to maintain or repair it, must ensure to that extent that it is safe and without risk to health.

The Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007 (S.I. No. 299 of 2007) are more specific. Regulation 30 requires that, for work equipment exposed to conditions causing deterioration, "deterioration is detected and remedied in good time". Regulation 89(d) requires "all defects found during the testing and inspection of an electrical installation" to be "rectified promptly so as to prevent danger". Neither sets a response time; both expect a fault to be dealt with before it causes harm.

02

What reactive maintenance covers in practice

In an office, school, health centre, hotel, shop or the common areas of an apartment block, reactive jobs fall into familiar groups:

• Plumbing and drainage: leaks, blocked toilets and gullies, dripping taps.
• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning: no heat, no cooling, a failed fan, faulty controls.
• Electrical: lights out, tripped circuits, damaged sockets.
• Doors, windows and locks: doors that will not close or lock, broken closers, cracked glazing, faulty access control.
• Fabric: roof and gutter leaks after heavy rain, fallen ceiling tiles, lifted flooring, loose handrails.
• Fire and life safety: a fire door that does not close onto its frame, an emergency light that fails its check, a fault on the fire alarm panel.
• Damage: vandalism, forced entry, storm damage, flooding.

Most are found not by the maintenance team but by the cleaner, the security officer or the caretaker on their rounds. Employees have a legal part in this. Under section 13(1)(h) of the 2005 Act, an employee must report to the employer or another appropriate person, as soon as practicable, "any defect in the place of work, the systems of work, any article or substance" which might endanger anyone's safety, health or welfare at work.

In house or bought in from a facilities management (FM) provider, every job follows the same path: reported with its location, prioritised and assigned; made safe and fixed; checked and closed; and the reporter told.

03

Priorities and response times

Reactive work needs one priority scale that everyone uses the same way. The times below are examples only; the real ones belong in the contract or service level agreement and should reflect the building and its use.

• Priority 1, emergency: an immediate risk to health, safety, security or the building, such as a major leak or a failed exit door. Attend and make safe within an hour or two, around the clock.
• Priority 2, urgent: a fault that stops part of the building being used or will get worse quickly, such as no heating in a classroom block in January. Attend within 24 hours.
• Priority 3, routine: inconvenient but not a risk, such as a dripping tap. Attend within a few working days.
• Priority 4, planned: work that can wait to be grouped with other jobs, within weeks.

1. Separate attendance from completion. The response time is when someone arrives or makes the fault safe; the fix time is when it is resolved. Measure both, or a contractor can meet every response target while jobs wait weeks for parts.
2. Judge the fault, not the complaint. Priority follows risk and how critical the asset is. A failed light is a nuisance in an office and a safety risk on an escape route.
3. Plan for out of hours. Say who answers at night and at weekends, who can authorise a call-out and up to what value, where the isolation points are, and what the security officer or caretaker should do while they wait.

Treat fire safety faults as a class of their own. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's Fire Safety Guide for Building Owners and Operators (August 2023), written for persons having control under section 18(2) of the Fire Services Acts 1981 and 2003, says: "Faults are a life safety issue – not simply a maintenance issue to be dealt with later; faults should be entered in the fire safety register and corrected promptly."

A make-safe is not a repair. A leak isolated at the valve, a window boarded up or a wet floor cordoned off is the right first response, but the job stays open until the permanent fix is done. The same guide says defective electrical equipment "should not be used", and that repairs should be carried out only by competent persons.

04

Reactive versus proactive maintenance: the pros and cons, and the cost

Some reactive work is unavoidable, and the pros and cons are real. In its favour: less planning and scheduling, no spending on inspections of items that may never fail, and a sensible choice for cheap, non-critical items. Against it, when it becomes the whole strategy:

• Higher costs per job: call-out charges, out-of-hours rates, parts bought at short notice, and secondary damage, such as a ceiling ruined by a blocked gutter that regular maintenance would have cleared.
• Downtime: rooms, lifts or services out of use after unexpected breakdowns, disrupting the building's operations, and maintenance teams pulled from planned work to emergency repairs.
• Shorter asset life: equipment and other assets run until they break usually wear out sooner.
• Safety risks: the HSA's sheet warns that buildings and structures "that are not maintained regularly eventually become unsafe", for the people who work in them, those who enter them and even passers-by.
• A budget nobody can plan: reactive costs arrive unannounced, whether for a single occupier or an owners' management company (OMC) setting its service charge.

Some maintenance strategies aim for roughly 80% planned work and 20% reactive, sometimes called the 80/20 rule, but no Irish rule sets a ratio of proactive maintenance to reactive work. More useful than a ratio is to look at reactive jobs by asset, location and cause. Repeat problems on one piece of equipment point to something that needs replacing or adding to the planned schedule; a cluster of breakdowns in one area points to a root cause, such as a failing roof or an undersized drain. Tools such as a CAFM system make that analysis easier because every job is linked to an asset and a location; in a smaller building a well-kept job log can do the same.

The aim of a sound maintenance strategy is not to eliminate reactive work but to choose it, asset by asset, and put resources into preventing failures where they would hurt most. Some of the choice is made for you: under regulation 31 of the 2007 Regulations, work equipment must be kept "by means of adequate maintenance" at a compliant level throughout its working life, and under regulation 13 fire detection and fire-fighting equipment must be inspected and maintained, and "serviced by a competent person as frequently as necessary". That critical equipment cannot be run to failure. In an apartment block, a pattern of repairs to the same element is often the evidence an OMC's board and its managing agent need to plan larger work from the building investment fund.

05

Contractors, safe repairs and closing the loop

Most buildings use contractors for some reactive work; the HSA's sheet says there will always be tasks "too big or specialised" for an in-house team. The arrangements that matter are:

• Approved contractors: a short list per trade, with insurance and competence checked. Regulation 88 of the 2007 Regulations requires anyone doing electrical work that needs technical knowledge and experience to prevent danger to be competent or suitably supervised.
• Rates and authority: call-out, minimum and out-of-hours rates agreed before the first emergency, and who can instruct a contractor up to what value.
• A briefing on arrival: the HSA's sheet says external maintenance workers must liaise with management or a designated person when they arrive; you brief them on your workplace's hazards and they brief you on the hazards of their work.
• Safe systems of work: isolation before work starts, permits to work, lock-off and tagging, and planned work at height. Where work may disturb asbestos, its types and locations must have been identified by a competent person first.
• Construction rules: under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Construction) Regulations 2013 (S.I. No. 291 of 2013), construction work includes the repair, upkeep and maintenance of a structure and of the services fixed within it, so many repairs bring those duties with them.
• Evidence of completion: what was found and done, photographs where they help and, for electrical or fire work, the competent person's report.

The HSA names falls from height, live plant, disturbing asbestos and falls of heavy items as the maintenance hazards that most merit attention, and notes the time pressure of high-priority repairs. An emergency call-out is the job most likely to skip the briefing, so build it into the call-out procedure.

Closing the job has two halves, and the second gets forgotten:

1. Check the fix. Someone on site, not only the contractor, confirms the fault is resolved. A job closed by the engineer who did it is a claim, not a check.
2. Tell the person who reported it. People who never hear back stop reporting, and the next fault is found by a complaint or an accident instead.

Review response and fix times monthly with each provider, alongside repeat visits and reopened jobs, and show them in the facilities management report. When an insurer, an HSA inspector or a fire authority officer asks what was done about a fault, the answer should be a record, not a recollection.

06

Where the record fails, and where SiteClara fits

Reactive maintenance records are usually good from the moment a job is raised on the helpdesk. They are weak before and after. Before, because faults found by cleaning, security and caretaking staff on their rounds are mentioned to whoever is passing, so nobody can say when a fault was first seen. After, because nobody checks the fix or tells the reporter, and the same leak is reported three times.

SiteClara covers the teams on the ground. A printed QR poster at each location, with an NFC tag behind it if staff would rather tap, lets cleaners, security officers and caretakers scan or tap with their own phone, with no app to install, and report an issue with a photo. The report already knows the building and the location, and it goes onto the team's list of open jobs until someone closes it; a repeat report of the same issue there is counted on the open job rather than starting another. The supervisor's queue groups open jobs by building and floor, and a supervisor can escalate a job to the building manager, who can answer it.

Each day the supervisor approves a report that goes the next morning to nominated contacts, such as the facilities manager or the managing agent, showing what was reported, what was closed and what is still open.

07

Questions people ask

What is the difference between preventative and reactive maintenance?

Reactive maintenance is done after something has failed; preventive maintenance is done before, to stop it failing. The HSA's information sheet on maintenance calls the first corrective or reactive maintenance, and describes the second as actions at set intervals or to prescribed criteria, such as the manufacturer's manual, to reduce the probability of failure. The sheet names these as the two types of maintenance.

Who has to report a fault in an Irish workplace?

Every employee who is aware of one. Under section 13(1)(h) of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, an employee must report, as soon as practicable, any defect in the place of work, the systems of work or any article or substance which might endanger anyone at work, to the employer or another appropriate person.

Is a repair to a building construction work?

Often, yes. The definition of construction work in the Construction Regulations 2013 includes the repair, upkeep and maintenance of a structure, and the maintenance and repair of mechanical, electrical, gas and similar services fixed within or to it.

08

Further reading, and a list to take away

The HSA publishes the information sheet on maintenance quoted here. The Fire Safety Guide for Building Owners and Operators sets out how fire safety faults are recorded and corrected. NSAI publishes I.S. EN 13306:2017. SFG20, developed in the UK by BESA, is a library of maintenance schedules and tasks; its references to UK law do not apply in Ireland. See also the building maintenance checklist.

To keep reactive maintenance under control, check that:

• every fault is logged with its location, the time and who reported it;
• staff know how to report a defect and hear back when they do;
• priorities follow risk and how critical the asset is, with example faults for each level;
• response and fix times are measured separately;
• out-of-hours emergencies have a named route, an authorised person and known isolation points;
• contractors are approved, briefed on arrival and told about asbestos before work that could disturb it;
• fire safety faults go into the fire safety register at once and are corrected promptly;
• make-safes stay open until the permanent repair is done;
• repeat faults feed the planned maintenance schedule.