Building Warrant of Fitness (BWOF)

Building Warrant of Fitness

Keep your building’s fitness in tip-top shape

Being the building owner brings responsibility for its continued maintenance and required certification. As the owner, you are required to renew a building’s warrant of fitness (BWOF) every 12 months, signing, issuing and publicly displaying to prove the building’s life safety specified systems, including all passive fire protection systems, have been maintained and inspected by IQPs or other certified inspectors.

Building warrants of fitness’ are an important part of life for most commercial buildings and facilities. PASSAFE Fire Protection can offer a truly all-round service for your building and can help manage your building compliance needs, little or large.

PASSAFE’s qualified inspectors can implement and complete inspections of your 'passive' building compliance systems – including signage, cable collars, final exits, fire separations and opening protections etc.

We can also audit and certify your building to your Compliance Schedule, and offer full Building Warrant of Fitness (BWOF) management. This means our team can collaborate and coordinate with other IQP contractors, provide them relevant documentation and have all files required for BWOF standards filed and completed with warrant documents every year when renewals and inspections take place. We can also provide assured and accurate amendments to your Compliance Schedule to maintain your building’s fire protection standards and complete warrant documents.

Servicing all your fire safety elements in your facility

A BWOF is your affirmation that the building's specified systems, including passive fire protection systems, have been examined and kept in good working order as required in the building's compliance schedule.

The Building Warrant of Fitness (BWOF) framework requires all structures / buildings and facilities with specific fire safety elements, (for example, fire partitions and separations) to acquire and keep up a BWOF. This requires the foundation of a testing administration to guarantee that key life safety elements inside the facility or building are tried and tested frequently and kept up in great working order, while satisfactory records kept.

What we can provide for your passive fire protection BWOF

BWOF Monthly Owners’ Inspections

PASSAFE can visit your building on a monthly basis, perform and record inspections of your passive fire protection systems. This BWOF procedure requires essential, common sense assessments of your specified systems. These checks are not troublesome, nor do they require any specialised gear, however, exact records, date and specifics of these examinations must be kept to comply with BWOF standards.

BWOF Annual Inspections and Issuing BWOF’s

Additional complete checks are required on a yearly premise, as the BWOF verifies that the inspection, maintenance and reporting procedures for all the specialised systems within your building have been carried out in accordance with the Compliance Schedule for the previous 12 months. We can manage these inspections for you. PASSAFE can also organise, collate and complete the documentation during the year, issue your Building Warrant of Fitness, and submit relevant files to the council.

Evacuation Schemes and Trial Evacuations

The NZ Fire Service requires any premises that fall under the following conditions, to have an approved evacuation scheme.

• the gathering together, for any purpose, of 100 or more persons (over the entire building)
• providing employment facilities for 10 or more persons (over the entire building)
• providing accommodation for more than 5 persons (other than in 3 or fewer household units)
• a place where hazardous substances are present in quantities exceeding the prescribed minimum amounts (set out in Schedule 2 of the Regulations), whatever the purpose for which the building is used
• providing early childhood facilities (other than in a household unit)
• providing nursing, medical, or geriatric care (other than in a household unit)
• providing specialised care for people with disabilities (other than in a household unit)
• providing accommodation for persons under lawful detention (not being persons’ subject to home detention)

The process is available on the Fire Service Website and can be completed by building owners, however at PASSAFE we can formulate this scheme, and complete the application to the NZ Fire Service for you. This process will include the provision of the required notices and signs, armbands, evacuation boards (where required) and scheduling and carry out your trial evacuations.