Chimney inspection log and certificate
Record what you inspected, what you found, and what you could not reach. SweepCert produces the document the householder keeps, and brings you back to the same chimney next year.
A certificate saying everything passed is easy to produce and worth very little if the attic run was boarded over and nobody wrote that down. What an estate agent, a householder or an insurer is actually looking at, months later, is the boundary of what you saw.
So SweepCert makes the gap a first-class thing. Not examined is its own answer, it needs a reason, and it is never quietly rolled into a pass.
Levels
The checks on your screen are built from the level you picked, and each carries the clause it comes from. Changing the level shows or hides checks and never discards an answer you have already given.
Continued service, same conditions, same or similar appliance
Readily accessible areas of the chimney, structure and flue. Freedom from obstruction and combustible deposits. Basic appliance installation and connection.
When Annual inspection, routine cleaning, or an appliance swapped for a similar one.
New or changed conditions of service, or Level I was not sufficient
Everything in Level I, plus the condition of accessible portions of the structure and all enclosed flues, clearances from combustibles in accessible locations, and the suitability of the flues for the appliances connected.
When An appliance added, removed or replaced with a dissimilar one. Before relining. Upon sale or transfer of the property. After a fire, a weather or seismic event, or any incident likely to have caused damage.
Concealed areas, and only where a lower level cannot settle it
Everything in Levels I and II, plus concealed portions of the structure and enclosed flues, and clearances from combustibles there.
When An incident known to have caused damage, or a hazard detected at a lower level that cannot be evaluated without opening up.
The standard writes them in Roman numerals and so does the app. The trade usually writes 1, 2 and 3, and they mean the same thing.
Three answers
Every check takes one of three answers and can carry a note and photographs. A defect opens a record of its own against the property, with what you found and where.
Not accessible is the one the app is strict about. It means you could not examine it, it is not the same as examining it and finding nothing wrong, and the inspection will not finish until you have written why.
Answering a check that sits above the level you are performing is allowed and does not drag the whole inspection up to that level. It is listed as additionally examined and changes nothing about the verdict.
The certificate
There is no state in which SweepCert refuses to produce the document. It is your record of your own visit, and holding it back would leave you with nothing to hand over while solving nothing. What changes is what it says.
Every check in scope was examined and answered, and the level completed is the level you set out to perform.
Something could not be examined and every one of those carries a reason. That is an honest record under 15.2.6, and the certificate prints the level completed as its own field.
Something could not be examined and no reason was given. The certificate says exactly that in place of the reason rather than leaving a silent hole, and the app warns you before you send it.
A check in scope was never answered at all. That is a blank on the form, not the sweep saying he looked and could not see, and the document names which is which.
A Level II with an inaccessible attic completed a Level I, and the certificate says so. Printing the attempted level as though it had been achieved would claim a scope that was not covered.
Next year
The recall runs twelve months from the last inspection on record, and every string that names it says inspection. NFPA 211 section 14.2 asks for an inspection at least once a year; cleaning follows from what that inspection finds.
The interval is per property and editable, because the real driver in the UK is an insurer's wording the app cannot see, and a thatched roof can be on three months. Due soon starts a month out, which is the notice you need to build the round.
The app
Two things it never claims
It does not certify a chimney safe and it never says an appliance may be used. Those are conclusions about a building, and this is a record of what one person examined on one day.
It also names no edition year. Chapter 15 is under active revision, and naming a year would claim conformance with a text nobody here has read end to end. The app says NFPA 211 and stops, in all ten of its languages.
Price
A 14-day trial you start yourself, with no card. Without paying you keep five completed inspections, which a one-van sweep does in a morning in October.
The cap applies only to completing a new inspection. Nothing already recorded is hidden, locked or deleted: a householder or an estate agent may come back for one of these years later.
Questions
NFPA 211 calls for one upon sale or transfer of the property, at 15.4.1(3). It is a consensus standard rather than law, and it binds where a jurisdiction adopts it, so SweepCert says what the standard calls for and never says required by law. The word statutory appears nowhere in the app.
You record it as not accessible and write why, and the app will not let you finish the inspection without the reason. Under 15.2.6 an inspector who cannot complete a level indicates the level completed and documents why the higher one was not, so a reason is part of the duty rather than a nicety.
Yes, always. The document is your record of your own visit, and withholding it leaves you with nothing to hand the householder while solving nothing. What changes is what the document says about itself.
It does, with a change in what the certificate claims. There is no UK equivalent of the tiered level scheme, so on a UK setting the certificate states plainly that NFPA 211 is a United States consensus standard, that this record uses its scope as a working framework, and that it has no standing in UK law.
No. NFPA 211 section 14.2 asks for an inspection at least once a year, and cleaning follows from what the inspection finds. The recall names the inspection, and the interval is editable per property, because in the UK what really drives the interval is an insurer’s wording the app cannot see.
No. The credential body and number are printed exactly as you enter them, with warnings ninety and thirty days before an expiry date you give it. The app verifies nothing and says so, and it never describes a trade association as a certifier.
Add the property and its appliance once. After that every visit is a level, a set of checks, and a certificate.
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