Anyone responsible for a building, a workshop or a fleet in the Netherlands looks it up at least once a year. How often does the fire extinguisher need servicing, when is the lift due again, and how long is that VCA certificate valid. The answers are scattered across the websites of inspection companies, which understandably sell their own service alongside them. Here are the usual intervals in one place, each with the standard or regulation it comes from, so you don't have to take our word for it.
One thing first. We deliberately write "usual" rather than "mandatory". What applies in your situation depends on your risk assessment, your insurer, your certification scheme and sometimes your municipality. The source behind each interval is the starting point for that conversation, not the end of it.
Fire safety
- Portable fire extinguishers, such as powder and foam extinguishers: yearly (NEN 2559).
- Fire hose reels: yearly (NEN-EN 671-3).
- Fire detection systems: yearly maintenance (NEN 2654-1).
Building and installations
- Lifts: every 18 months (Warenwetbesluit liften). The least round number on this list, which makes it the easiest to misremember as "yearly" or "every two years".
- Legionella sampling at priority installations, such as care facilities, hotels and campsites: every 6 months (Drinkwaterbesluit).
- Lifting equipment, from overhead cranes to hoists: yearly (Arbobesluit article 7.20).
People: certificates and refresher training
- BHV (in-house emergency response): yearly refresher (NIBHV).
- VCA certificate: valid for 10 years (VCA scheme).
- Code 95: 35 hours of refresher training every 5 years for professional drivers (EU professional driver competence rules).
Why NEN 3140 is not on this list
The inspection of electrical work equipment under NEN 3140 may be the most searched-for interval of all, and yet it has no number above. That is not an oversight. NEN 3140 does not prescribe a fixed term: the frequency follows from a risk assessment, and so it varies from months to years, per company and per type of equipment. Any site that promises you "yearly" is making it simpler than the standard does. A wrong interval with a confident source attached is worse than no interval, so we leave it honestly open.
Knowing the interval is not the same as being on time
The tricky part of inspections is not that the terms are unknown. It is that they all run on different rhythms. The extinguishers yearly, the lift every 18 months, the legionella sampling every six months, and five colleagues' VCA certificates each on their own date somewhere in a decade. That overview usually lives in a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet never says anything back. One colleague knows when everything is due, and as long as they are around it works.
In OwndUp you put those inspections in a list and attach a reminder to each row, so you are warned weeks ahead instead of afterwards. When you mark an inspection as handled, OwndUp proposes the next date itself, with exactly the intervals and sources from this article attached, always overwritable. The date of the last inspection is updated automatically, and because you share the list with your team, the warning no longer depends on one mailbox.
The terms rarely change. Who remembers them changes all the time. Put them in a list that warns you once, and you won't need to look this article up again next year.