Commissioning Information Request Checklist

List every system installed or altered during the project and ask, for each one, whether it involved a setting up step once it was in place.

The list makes silence visible, which is often the only way to notice a system nobody has told you anything about.

Establish whether any system was set up in stages, since the person who attended first may hold information the last attendance never captured.

Staged work leaves information split between people who never spoke to each other about it.

Note where one system was set up on the assumption that another behaves in a particular way, such as controls shared between heating and hot water.

Interdependent settings are where later adjustments do the most damage, because changing one quietly undoes another.

Ask which items were set up by the manufacturer or their agent rather than by the installing trade, and record which applies to each item.

Who attended decides who you contact later, and it is rarely the person you have been speaking to throughout the project.

Write down anything left at a default state that is expected to be adjusted once you have lived with the property for a while.

Ask a qualified professional to make any adjustment described as expected rather than experimenting with the setting yourself.

Ask whether anything could not be set up fully at the time and what the reason was, recording both the item and the reason.

An item that could not be fully set up should be followed up with a qualified professional rather than left as it is.

Request a written record of the values each system was left set to, in a form you can compare against what the controls show later.

Without a starting record there is no way to tell whether a system has changed or whether your memory of it has.

Photograph every control panel and display as it was left, close enough to read and wide enough to show which unit it belongs to.

Photographs capture settings nobody thought to write down, including ones on equipment you did not know had settings.

Ask which settings you are able to change yourself and which should only be altered by a qualified professional, and write the two lists separately.

Where there is any doubt about whether a setting is yours to change, treat it as one for a qualified professional.

Note where a value on one item was chosen to suit another item, since altering one in isolation frequently undoes both at once.

Settings chosen as a pair look independent on the control panel and are not, which is how well meaning adjustments cause faults.

Ask what each recorded value is actually doing in plain terms, and write the explanation in your own words beside the value.

A number with no explanation beside it is no more useful than no record at all when somebody asks about it later.

Record who set each value, so that a later question can go to the person who made the choice rather than into a general enquiry.

General enquiries about a setting made a long time ago tend to be answered with a shrug or a fresh visit.

Establish which control is the one you will use day to day, since installations often leave several that appear to do much the same thing.

Owners routinely adjust the wrong control for a long time, then conclude the system does not work.

Find out what happens to the settings if power is lost, and whether anything has to be entered again afterwards and by whom.

If settings have to be re-entered after a power loss, ask a qualified professional to do it rather than working from memory.

Note any control that is deliberately locked or restricted, and ask who holds the means to change it and how they are reached.

A locked control with nobody named against it becomes an obstacle the first time a genuine adjustment is needed.

Ask how to tell whether a system is running or waiting, since many controls look identical in both states and owners assume the worst.

A great many reported faults turn out to be equipment behaving exactly as intended in a state nobody explained.

Write down what the indicator lights and symbols on your equipment mean, since printed material often covers a whole family of models.

Generic literature describes indicators your unit does not have and omits the ones it does, which is why a written note from the installer matters.

Ask what the sensible response is to each fault indication, and whether any of them means stopping use of the system altogether.

A fault indication on heating, gas, electrical or ventilation equipment is a reason to contact a qualified professional, not to clear it repeatedly.

Ask what documents each trade issues after setting up a system, and record what you have been given against what you were told to expect.

Whether an installation of this kind produces any document at all is a question for the trade that carried it out and for the relevant local authority.

Check who holds the original of each document and whether you should receive a copy or the original itself, and note which you actually have.

Some documents are of little use as a copy, and discovering that when they are needed leaves no time to obtain the original.

Note which documents refer to a specific item by its serial marking, and check that the marking matches the item actually installed here.

Paperwork prepared in advance sometimes describes the item originally intended rather than the one that arrived on the day.

Ask which paperwork a future buyer, insurer or lender may ask about, and then confirm that directly with the organisation concerned.

Only the insurer, lender or their adviser can say what they require; treat any answer given on site as a prompt to ask them.

Where a document is described as following on, ask who is sending it and how it will arrive, rather than accepting a general assurance that it is in hand.

Documents without a named sender and a route are the ones that are still outstanding long after the project has closed.

Ask whether any document has to be sent to a third party by the installing trade rather than by you, and note who is doing it.

A document that sits between two parties who have each finished their part is a document that goes nowhere at all.

Find out what the setting up work assumed about how the property will be used, since an assumption that no longer holds changes everything downstream of it.

Assumptions about occupancy and use are made silently and rarely revisited, even when the household changes completely.

Note anything that was set up in mild conditions and may behave differently once the weather turns, and ask what to look out for.

A system that appears settled in easy conditions is not the same as one that has been through a demanding spell.

Ask which parts of a system were left untouched because they were existing, since old and new sections often meet without either party owning the junction.

Where new work meets an existing installation, ask a qualified professional who is responsible for the junction rather than assuming.

Establish whether adjustment across the property was carried out as a whole or item by item, and record which of the two was done.

Item by item adjustment can leave a property that works room by room and not as a single installation.

Record what you were told about noise from the installation, since equipment that sounds different from what it replaced is a common surprise.

Noise complaints after handover are far easier to discuss when what was expected was written down beforehand.

Ask what would undo the setting up work, such as altering a control, changing a fitting or closing something off elsewhere in the property.

Before altering anything that might affect a system that has been set up, ask the qualified professional who set it up.

Write down which alterations would mean asking for a system to be set up again, and keep that note at the front of the record.

The trigger list is the part a future owner or trade will read first, and it is almost never written down.

Ask whether adding, removing or moving a single item elsewhere in the property affects how the system as a whole was balanced.

Ask a qualified professional before altering anything connected to a system that has been balanced across the property.

Note who to contact for a repeat visit and whether that is the installing trade, the manufacturer agent or somebody else entirely.

The right contact for a repeat visit is often different from the contact for the original work, and nobody volunteers this.

Ask what information a different trade would need in order to work on this system in future without starting from nothing.

A system nobody can pick up cheaply becomes a system nobody wants to touch, which limits your options later.

Record where the earlier settings are stored so that a later attendance can see what has changed rather than guessing at it.

History is what turns a service visit into a short conversation instead of a long investigation.

Ask whether anything is expected to drift in normal use and should simply be looked at again once you have lived with the property.

Anything described as expected to drift should be revisited by a qualified professional rather than corrected by the owner.

Keep the setting up information with the manuals for the same items, since the two are much less useful apart and are usually filed separately.

Manuals describe what a device can do and the setting record describes what yours was told to do; neither answers a question alone.

Write a plain summary in your own words at the front of each system record, so that somebody unfamiliar can find their way into it.

Technical records are unreadable to the person most likely to need them, which is usually the next owner of the property.

Note where each item the record refers to physically sits, since a record naming equipment without saying where it is wastes the next visit.

A surprising amount of a service visit is spent finding the equipment rather than working on it.

Check that you can actually open every file you have been sent, and ask for a plain readable version of anything that needs a particular program to view.

Files that need particular software become unreadable long before the equipment they describe stops working.

Record which parts of what you were told were given verbally and never confirmed in writing, and keep that list with the record.

Marking the verbal material as verbal stops it being treated later as though it came from a document.

Keep a note of the questions you asked and the answers you were given, since the answers age considerably better than your memory of them.

Your own question log is often the only place a particular explanation exists anywhere in the project record.