Dry risers, and the supply you only need once

Every other asset in a building announces when it stops working. The lift sticks, the alarm sounds, the boiler goes cold and somebody phones in. A dry riser gives no signal at all. It is an empty steel pipe running up the building with a locked inlet cabinet at the bottom and a landing valve on each floor, and it does nothing whatsoever until a fire crew pulls up outside, connects a hose to the inlet and pumps water into it.

That is the whole problem. The first genuine test of a dry riser is the day it has to work, and by then nobody is in a position to fix it.

Where the requirement comes from

The Building Regulations, through Approved Document B, require fire mains in buildings with a floor more than 18m above the level of fire and rescue service vehicle access. The mains give crews a water supply at the fire floor without running hose up the stairs from a hydrant, which at height is slow and unreliable.

Up to 50m the main can be dry or wet. Above 50m it has to be wet, meaning permanently charged and pressurised from a tank and pump set, because the pressure needed at that height is beyond what a pumping appliance can push from the street. Below that line, most residential blocks in this country have a dry main, and the water only arrives when the brigade brings it.

What the maintenance regime actually asks for

The code of practice is BS 9990, still in its 2015 edition, covering the design, installation, testing and maintenance of non-automatic firefighting systems. It sets two cycles.

A visual inspection every six months by a competent person. That looks for the obvious and the mundane: missing or damaged inlet caps, the condition of the breeching inlet, valves strapped and padlocked closed, perished washers, seized hand-wheels, damaged or missing signage, and whether the inlet cabinet can actually be reached and opened.

A pressure test every twelve months. The main is charged with water and pressurised, commonly to 12 bar and held for around fifteen minutes, to prove there is nothing leaking and nothing structurally wrong with pipework that has spent the year dry. Outlets are opened and checked, and the system is drained down properly afterwards.

Neither of these is exotic work. It is a half day with a contractor and a certificate. The failures that turn up are equally ordinary: vandalised landing valves, a stolen inlet cap letting debris into the breeching, washers gone hard, a hand-wheel that will not turn, and, more often than anyone would like, a bin store or a parked car in front of the inlet cabinet.

The monthly duty most people miss

For high-rise residential buildings, defined as 18m or at least seven storeys with two or more dwellings, Regulation 7 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 adds a layer on top of BS 9990.

The responsible person must carry out monthly routine checks of lifts for use by firefighters, evacuation lifts and essential firefighting equipment. The regulation is explicit that essential firefighting equipment includes the inlets and outlets for dry rising mains and wet rising mains, alongside smoke control systems, suppression systems and the fire detection and alarm system.

Where a fault is found, the responsible person must take steps to put it right. If it cannot be rectified within 24 hours of being identified, it must be reported to the local fire and rescue authority by electronic means, and the rectification reported the same way once it is done.

And a record of those monthly checks must be kept, and made accessible to the residents of the building.

That last clause changes the character of the duty. A record residents can ask to see is not a note in a contractor's portal or a signature on a paper sheet in a cupboard. It has to exist somewhere, in a form somebody else can be shown.

Three separate clocks on one asset

So a single dry riser in a typical high-rise block carries three cadences at once, set by three different instruments:

A monthly visual check under Regulation 7, recorded and available to residents, with a 24 hour reporting clock attached to any fault that cannot be closed on the day.

A six monthly inspection under BS 9990, by a competent person.

An annual pressure test under BS 9990, with a certificate.

They are not alternatives. The monthly check does not discharge the six monthly, and the annual test does not cover the months in between. In practice they are usually held in different places too. The annual certificate is with the fire contractor, the six monthly sits in an email, and the monthly check is done by whoever happened to be on site.

What the audit actually asks

Fire and rescue authorities carried out 4,696 audits of purpose-built flats of four storeys and over in the year ending March 2026, up 10% from 4,264 the year before. Blocks of ten storeys and over take the longest audits of any premises type, at an average of 9.4 hours, nearly four hours above the overall average (Home Office, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, April 2025 to March 2026).

Nine hours is not nine hours of looking at a building. It is an inspecting officer working through records. For firefighting equipment the questions are predictable enough to write down in advance. When was the last pressure test, and where is the certificate. What did the six monthly inspection find, and what happened to the findings. Show me the monthly checks for the last twelve months. This valve was reported faulty in March, when was it fixed, and when did you tell us.

A building can have a perfectly sound riser and still come out of that badly, because the answer to every question is that somebody will need to look for it.

Where SAMRISK puts it

SAMRISK holds the building and the land it sits on across thirty connected systems, twenty for the building and ten for the land. The dry riser is an item in the fire safety register with its own history, so the annual pressure test, the six monthly inspection and the monthly Regulation 7 checks all attach to the same asset rather than living in three places.

A fault raised on a monthly check becomes a dated record with a 24 hour reporting deadline against it, and the rectification is recorded on the same item, so the sequence of found, reported, fixed, reported again is one trail rather than four emails. The test dates drive the compliance calendar, which means next year's pressure test is already a task rather than something that surfaces when the certificate expires.

None of that makes the pipe work. Only the contractor and the test do that. What it does is mean that on the day you are asked, the answer is a date and a document, and that the fault found in March is not still open in September because nobody was watching it.

Sources: HM Government, Approved Document B (Fire safety), Volume 1; BS 9990:2015, Non-automatic fire-fighting systems in buildings, code of practice; The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, regulation 7; Home Office, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, April 2025 to March 2026.