Periodic inspections in hotels: boilers, lifts, electrics and fire systems on one calendar

Periodic inspection is a check of specified equipment and installations by a person authorized to carry it out, ending in a signed record the employer must keep and show to the authorities. In Türkiye, the work equipment regulation's Annex III sets the list and, where no standard sets a period, a one-year maximum.

The inspection report lands in the middle of August. One line says the boiler must not be used until the defect is fixed, and the hotel is full. What happens next is decided by paperwork you either have or do not have. After reading this you will know which equipment in your hotel falls under periodic inspection of hotel equipment, who is allowed to inspect it, how the reports must be signed and kept, and how to put every date on one yearly calendar.

What is periodic inspection, and how is it different from maintenance?#

Periodic inspection is a check that a person authorized to carry it out performs on listed equipment, and it ends in a signed record. Maintenance is the work that keeps the equipment running. Neither replaces the other.

The legal basis is the Regulation on Health and Safety Conditions in the Use of Work Equipment (Resmî Gazete, 25 April 2013, No. 28628), whose Annex III was rewritten on 23 December 2025 (No. 33116). It applies to every workplace covered by Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331, which includes a hotel. The inspection must be carried out by persons authorized to carry out periodic inspections; your own technician, however capable, is not that person for the listed items.

The output is a record, not a repair. The report states the condition of the item and any instruction that comes with it, and the employer keeps it. Maintenance is continuous and can be done in-house; inspection is periodic, external and documented. A clean maintenance log does not stand in for a missing inspection report.

There are two separate legal tracks. Work equipment follows the work equipment regulation, while lifts covered by the Lift Regulation follow a separate one, described below. In practice the inspection calendar sits on top of the hotel preventive maintenance plan: the plan tells you what you do, the calendar tells you what must be proven and by whom.

A useful test: for every listed item, can you produce a signed report dated within the required interval? If the answer is a maintenance sheet, the item is uncovered.

Which hotel equipment does Annex III put under periodic inspection?#

The tables of Annex III list the equipment types, and where the relevant standard sets no period the maximum interval is one year.

The list includes steam and superheated-water boilers, and central-heating and hot-water boilers. In a hotel this is usually the plant room, and often the single most expensive item to take out of service. It also covers compressed air and gas tanks, closed expansion tanks, and hot-water storage (boyler) and accumulation tanks.

Steam cooking boilers in the kitchen are easy to overlook because they sit inside a department rather than a plant room. Goods lifts, service lifts and escalators appear on this list with a one-year maximum where no standard sets a period.

The one-year figure is a ceiling, not a default. The regulation says where the relevant standard sets no period, the maximum is one year, so the standard for each item has to be checked before you write a date into the calendar.

Build the list by walking the property once. Write down what you find, with its location and its label. Keep the list closed: equipment added later, a new combi oven or a replacement tank, has to be added on the day it arrives, not at the next audit.

Which installations are checked once a year?#

Unless the standards say otherwise, installations are inspected once a year: electrical and earthing installations, lightning protection, generators, transformers, fire-extinguishing and sprinkler systems, portable fire extinguishers, fire detection and alarm systems, and ventilation and air-conditioning installations.

These are systems rather than single machines, so the inspection covers the installation as a whole and produces one report per system, not one per device. Earthing and lightning protection are easy to leave out of the file, because nothing visibly fails when they are untested.

Generators and transformers carry the emergency power chain. A generator that starts is not the same as an installation that has been inspected. The fire items are portable extinguishers, fire detection and alarm, and fire-extinguishing and sprinkler systems; the fire report a hotel prepares under the fire safety rules for hotels in Türkiye is a different document, and the inspection record sits beside it, not in place of it.

Ventilation and air-conditioning installations include the kitchen extract, which is where a hotel feels the consequence first. The phrase "unless the standards say otherwise" applies here too, so the calendar entry is a starting point that the inspection body confirms for your installation. Assign each installation a named owner in the hotel; shared ownership between technical and safety roles is how a date gets missed.

Who inspects a hotel lift, and who has to arrange it?#

A lift in continuous use in a building is inspected at least once a year by an A-type inspection body the Ministry has authorized and that has a protocol with the local administration. The duty to have this done lies with the local administration and the building manager.

The track is separate: the Lift Periodic Inspection Regulation (Resmî Gazete, 4 May 2018, No. 30411), Article 8, not the work equipment regulation. An A-type inspection body, in plain words, is a private inspection body authorized by the Ministry for lifts and working under a protocol with the local administration. Ask for the authorization and the protocol before you book.

Annex III of the work equipment regulation lists goods lifts, service lifts and escalators with a one-year maximum where no standard sets a period. Lifts covered by the Lift Regulation follow the lift regulation. Ask the inspection body which track each of your lifts is on, and write the answer down.

The responsibility sentence matters for a hotel. The regulation places the duty on the local administration and the building manager, so a hotel that is the building manager, or that acts for the owner, is arranging the inspection in practice. Confirm where you sit in the building's management arrangement, and confirm it with a legal adviser rather than assuming the owner or the management company has it covered. Keep the lift report in the same file as the rest of the inspection records, so one request from an inspector can be answered from one place.

Reports: who signs them, where are they kept, and what does an inspector ask to see?#

The employer records the results, wet-signed or with a secure electronic signature, and keeps them to show the authorities whenever they ask.

The record is the employer's obligation. It does not live in the inspection firm's filing cabinet, and a promise to send it later is not a record. The regulation accepts a wet signature or a secure electronic signature; a scanned, unsigned PDF is neither, so ask the inspection body how the report will be signed before the visit.

File by item, not by year. One folder per boiler, one per lift, one per installation, so the history of a single item is one document set rather than a search across twelve months. Keep an index sheet: item, location, inspection date, inspection body, result, defects noted, date closed. This is the document that makes an inspection visit short.

Keep the evidence that a defect was cleared next to the report that raised it. A repair invoice shows money was spent, not that the defect was fixed. When the authorities ask, they ask about a specific item and a specific date; the index answers that in seconds, a shelf of folders does not.

Closing a defect properly is the same discipline as closing a maintenance work order: the job is done when the evidence is in the file, not when the work stops.

What happens when a report says "do not use"?#

The equipment is not used until the defects are fixed. The sentence is an instruction, not a recommendation.

Isolate the item and tag it, then tell the department that depends on it before they discover it themselves. Find the temporary alternative and write down the decision and who made it. For example, running on the second boiler while the first is out of service, with the hot-water capacity checked against the house count.

Fix the defect, then get the re-inspection or the written clearance before the item returns to service. The report that stopped the equipment is not the report that releases it. Record the closure in the same file, with the date and the name of the person who accepted it.

Plan the guest-facing message early. Hot water, a lift out of service or a closed kitchen line reaches the front desk before it reaches the general manager. A full season is not a reason to keep using the item; the instruction is written into the regulation for exactly the week when it is inconvenient.

How do you put all of this on one yearly calendar?#

List every item, assign its legal track, then set the month backwards from the report date rather than forwards from the season.

One row per item, not one row per regulation. A boiler and a lift are two rows even though they are two different laws. Columns that work: item, location, legal track, interval, who arranges the inspection, who holds the report, last report date, planned month.

Set the planned month from the anniversary of the last report, minus a buffer. A report dated 12 March means the next one is planned for February, not for the following March. Book the inspection bodies early: a lift body working under a local protocol has its own schedule, and the good months fill first.

Keep inspections out of the months when the item cannot come out of service. A boiler inspection in the peak of August is a decision about hot water, not about paperwork. Review the calendar after every report: new equipment, new defects, new dates. Some systems carry their own separate record duties, such as pool water and staff records, and those dates belong on the same sheet so nothing is tracked twice. Seasonal properties will also want to align this sheet with the pre-season compliance checklist.

For example, a hotel's calendar might look like this:

What to do next#

Start with a single sheet: every listed item, its legal track, its last report date and the person who holds the report. Once that sheet exists, the calendar writes itself backwards from the dates, the gaps become visible, and a report that says do not use becomes a decision you can make calmly instead of a crisis in August.