Plumbing Contractors Editing and Proofreading Services

A water system is filled, tested and left. Between that day and the day the building is occupied there may be eleven weeks of stagnant warm water sitting in dead legs and unused outlets. What protects the first people to use those showers is a flushing and disinfection regime carried out properly and recorded in a way that means something — and what usually exists is a certificate saying the system was chlorinated.

We edit what plumbing and mechanical services contractors produce — flushing, disinfection and water sampling records, pre-commissioning cleaning documentation, pressure and soundness test records, water system handover and log book documentation, dead leg and temperature control documentation, commissioning records for hot and cold services, method statements for testing and disinfection, operation and maintenance content for water systems, above-ground drainage test records, and handover guidance for building operators including their ongoing duties. Our editors work on the record that has to protect the first user.

The flushing, disinfection and handover record is where a water system is either safe on day one or hoping, and its failure is documenting an event rather than a condition. A certificate of disinfection proves that a procedure was carried out; it says nothing about what happened afterwards. We work through these so the record states the date the system was filled and every date it was flushed since, since the interval between filling and occupation is the whole of the risk and it is almost never on the certificate; so the disinfection is recorded with the concentration achieved, at which outlets, the contact time and the final flush, rather than as a completed activity; so the sampling is recorded with where each sample was taken, when, by whom and the laboratory result, given that samples from the plant room prove nothing about the outlet at the end of the run; so the outlets that were not commissioned or not accessible are listed, because these are precisely the ones that will sit unused; so the temperature achievement at the sentinel outlets is recorded with the time to temperature, as this is the ongoing control the whole system relies on; so the ongoing regime the operator must run is stated as a schedule with who does it, since the handover is the moment that duty transfers and it is routinely transferred to nobody; and so the log book is left populated rather than blank. Records written this way protect the first person to use the shower.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including test records, certificates and project information. We are editors rather than water hygiene, mechanical or public health specialists, and we offer no view on disinfection, sampling or risk. What we can do is make the record describe a condition rather than an event.