IQP vs DIY

It is a fair question, and people ask it for sensible reasons. You have a maintenance team. Your chef has been cleaning canopies for twenty years. Why pay someone else to look at a duct?

The short answer: you can do a good deal of the maintenance yourself, and you should. What you cannot do is certify it. And the reason has less to do with skill than you might expect.

What the Word Independent Is Doing

An Independent Qualified Person is approved by a territorial authority as qualified to inspect, maintain and report on particular specified systems. Two tests sit inside that.

Qualified is the one people focus on. It means the council has assessed your competence for that class of system and registered you for it. Registration is granted council by council and class by class. Being an IQP for SS9 in Auckland does not make you an IQP for SS9 in Napier, and it certainly does not make you an IQP for sprinklers anywhere.

Independent is the one that answers the DIY question. The person certifying must have no financial interest in the building.

That is not a comment on your integrity. It is a structural rule, and it exists for the same reason auditors do not audit their own accounts. The regime is built so that the person signing has nothing to lose by finding a problem. A building owner certifying their own building fails that test no matter how honest they are, because the certificate would be worth exactly as much as the owner's word, and the whole point of the certificate is to be worth more than that.

So an in house maintenance manager, however skilled, cannot issue the Form 12A for their employer's building.

What You Absolutely Should Do Yourself

Plenty of the work on a compliance schedule is designed to be done in house, and doing it well makes everything else cheaper and easier.

• Filter cleaning. Usually the most frequent task on the schedule and almost always a staff job. Every bit of grease a filter catches is grease that never reaches the ductwork.
• Canopy wipe downs. Daily or per shift, as part of normal kitchen close.
• Emptying grease collection cups. Small job, easily forgotten, visible to any inspector.
• Visual checks. Is the fan running, is the airflow noticeably weaker, is there a new noise, is there grease appearing where it should not be.
• Keeping the log. Dates, tasks, initials. A laminated sheet by the canopy is fine.

That last one carries more weight than people expect. When we cannot sign a certificate, a missing in house log is one of the most common reasons, and it is entirely preventable.

What Needs a Specialist, Certification Aside

Separate from the legal question, some of this work is genuinely not a DIY job.

• Full duct run cleaning. Confined spaces, caustic chemistry, and a standard of bare metal that hand wiping does not reach.
• Fan and impeller work. Electrical isolation and lock off, and often rooftop access with edge protection.
• Anything at height or on a roof. Height safety is its own discipline with its own consequences.
• Airflow verification. Requires instruments and knowing what the readings should be.

Our guide to what a professional clean involves walks through the full process if you want to see what is actually involved.

Cleaning and Certifying Are Two Different Things

Worth separating these clearly, because the language gets muddled.

• Cleaning is maintenance. Anyone competent can carry it out, subject to the safety points above. Your compliance schedule may specify who and how often, but there is no registration requirement to hold a brush.
• Inspecting and certifying is a regulated act. Only an IQP registered for that system class with that council can issue the Form 12A.

A contractor can clean your ductwork beautifully and still not be able to certify it. Ask which one you are buying. Plenty of operators offer the clean and are quiet about the fact that you will need somebody else for the certificate.

We do both, which is usually simpler for the client, but you are entitled to use separate providers if you prefer. Some building owners deliberately do, on the view that a separate inspector is a stronger check. That is a legitimate position and we have no argument with it.

Why Signing Something You Should Not Is a Bad Trade

It is an offence for an IQP to issue a Form 12A when the compliance schedule procedures have not actually been met. Not a technical breach. An offence.

Which means if an inspector is willing to sign off a system they have barely looked at, they are risking their registration to save you a few hundred dollars, and you are getting a certificate that will not survive contact with an audit or an insurance claim.

A refusal to sign is the system working. It is annoying in the moment and it is the thing that makes the certificate worth having.

A Sensible Division of Labour

For most commercial kitchens, this is what works.

1. Kitchen staff handle filters, canopy surfaces and grease cups, logged on a visible sheet.
2. Your maintenance team handles visual checks and reports anything unusual early.
3. A specialist contractor cleans the full duct run and fan at the frequency your schedule requires, with photographs and a written report.
4. An IQP inspects and issues the Form 12A annually.
5. You keep all of it on file for at least two years.

Steps three and four can be the same company, and often are. Steps one and two cannot be outsourced no matter what you spend, because they happen daily.

For the wider picture, see BWOF kitchen extract requirements and what a 12A inspection involves.

Ductflow is registered for SS9 across Auckland, the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty and the Hawkes Bay.