Fire detection and alarm servicing: how often, and what is checked

General guidance only. Check the standard itself and take advice from your own competent person for the job in front of you. Last reviewed 22 October 2026.

Two jobs, two people

Keeping a fire alarm in working order is shared. The responsible person for the building (usually the owner, landlord or manager) looks after the day-to-day: the weekly test, the logbook and getting faults fixed. A competent servicing company, usually you, does the periodic inspection and test.

How often does a fire alarm need servicing?

BS 5839-1 expects a periodic inspection and test about every six months, and the 2025 edition keeps that cycle. What has changed is the wording around timing: a visit that lands between five and seven months after the last one no longer puts the system out of line with the standard. That gives you some room to schedule around access and shutdowns, but do not treat it as a reason to let visits drift.

What a service visit covers

The exact scope depends on the system, but a typical visit covers:

• Reading the logbook and checking what has happened since the last visit: faults, false alarms, building changes and any work by other contractors.
• The control panel: a look at the display, the fault and event history, the clock and the indicators.
• The power supply and standby batteries, including the readings you record against the battery calculation.
• A sample of detectors and call points, operated and recorded, plus sounders, beacons, remote indicators and any interfaces such as door holders or links to a monitoring centre.
• Whether the zone plan and the cause and effect information still match the building.

You do not test every device at every visit. A proportion is tested each time, chosen so that over a twelve-month cycle the whole system has been covered. Record which sections and devices were tested on the certificate so that next time you, or whoever follows you, can carry on from where you stopped. The 2025 edition also adds routine checks of remote indicators and visual alarm devices, and expects zone plans to be verified across the twelve months.

What the 12-month cycle adds

Think of the year as one programme rather than two separate visits. Planning the sample at the start of the contract is much easier than working out afterwards which devices have not been touched, and it is how anything that only falls due annually gets picked up.

The weekly test and the logbook

Between visits the responsible person operates one manual call point each week, using a different one each time so all of them are covered in rotation, at about the same time of day. The result and the call point used go in the logbook.

The logbook also records every fault and every false alarm. For each false alarm, note the date and time, the device and its location, the likely cause, what was happening in the area, what was done and whether the fire and rescue service attended. Under the 2025 edition any agreed variation from the standard also belongs in the logbook, which can be paper or digital.

False alarm management

BS 5839-1:2025 says every false alarm should be investigated and, where appropriate, acted on. The engineer should look at the pattern at each visit: repeated alarms from the same device, the same cause or the same time of day usually point to something that can be fixed, such as the wrong detector type for a kitchen, a dirty head or a door left open on steam.

The 2025 edition adds an annex on working out a false alarm rate and the point at which a closer investigation is needed. Read the annex itself for the figures rather than relying on rules of thumb from older editions.

If the system sends alarms to a monitoring centre, the false alarms matter even more, because repeated false calls can lead to a withdrawn response. Make sure the site knows who to ring before an alarm goes in.

Putting it together

• Book the next visit before you leave the site, and aim for roughly six months, allowing the one-month tolerance either side only when you need it.
• Record the sections and devices tested, the battery readings and any defects on the certificate.
• Raise defects as quotes the same week, while the site still remembers the visit.

How Compliar helps

Compliar has a fire alarm periodic inspection and servicing certificate referenced to BS 5839-1:2025, with panel, power supply and battery readings, and a link to the standby battery calculator beside them. The certificate goes to your customer as a branded PDF.

• Maintenance plans on a monthly, quarterly or six-monthly cycle, scheduled against the property, so a visit does not quietly slip past its interval (maintenance plans and scheduling are on Office seats and above).
• A digital fire log book for each site, with categories for the weekly fire alarm test, false alarm activations and fire system work or visits, plus a printable QR label so your team can open the logbook on site.
• Defects raised against the failed device, turned into a quote in a click.
• A site status that turns amber or red when servicing is due or overdue.