Full refurbishment or renovation: when the ESTI extends the inspection deadline

A case that comes up more often than it is discussed: the periodic inspection is due, and the owner is planning a full refurbishment anyway. Inspecting twice, once before and once after, makes little sense on the merits — the installation that would be checked will no longer exist in a year.

The NIV (Low-Voltage Installation Ordinance) provides for this case.

What applies

If the owner intends a full refurbishment or renovation of his electrical installations, the ESTI (Federal Inspectorate for Heavy Current Installations) decides case by case to what extent deadline extensions can be granted.

«Case by case» is meant literally. There is no entitlement and no form that triggers the extension automatically. There is a decision, and that decision has criteria.

What the decision depends on

As the ESTI describes it, such an extension depends essentially on

• whether the owner has already had an inspection carried out and a defect list exists;
• or whether he can present credible evidence that he has set about remedying those defects.

Both come down to the same thing: the ESTI extends the deadline for someone who is demonstrably under way — not for someone who has not yet started. The extension is not a postponement of the work but the recognition that the work is already in progress.

What this means for the contractor

The contractor is the one who produces the evidence. The owner files the application, but what he can enclose with it comes out of the workshop and the building site.

That makes three things more valuable than they look at the moment they are created:

1. The defect list itself, dated and assigned to the property — not as a loose PDF in an email thread, but in the installation's file.
2. Proof that remedying has begun. Dated Rapports (signed site work records), materials ordered, items carried out. Exactly the documents that are created anyway, provided they end up with the property instead of in four different places.
3. The link in time. An application that shows weeks rather than years between inspection, defect list and the first work carried out is a different application.

A contractor who keeps all this anyway writes the application in half an hour. One who has to hunt it all down does not write it at all — and has the installation inspected twice.

Do not confuse: the ordinary extension and the refurbishment extension

Two deadlines that regularly get mixed up in conversation:

• The ordinary extension of the deadline for submitting the safety certificate (Sicherheitsnachweis), which runs at most one year beyond the expiry of the inspection interval. It is the normal case and needs no renovation.
• The deadline extension for a full refurbishment, which the ESTI decides case by case.

The difference is not academic: the first is a deadline, the second is a decision. More on the first case in the article «The deadline for the safety certificate has passed»; which inspection interval applies in the first place is shown by the inspection interval calculator.

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Source: Federal Inspectorate for Heavy Current Installations ESTI, information sheet «Periodische Kontrolle der elektrischen Installationen» (periodic inspection of electrical installations), October 2017. This article is not legal advice; the ESTI decides on any deadline extension.