Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
The law requires a competent person to test your LEV, yet it never defines a licence to look for. Here is how qualification and experience really stack up.
Choosing an LEV examiner
When someone arrives to test your local exhaust ventilation, you are trusting them to decide whether the kit protecting your people from harmful dust, fume and vapour actually works - so it is worth knowing what real competence looks like.
Under COSHH Regulation 9, most LEV systems must have a thorough examination and test at least every 14 months, carried out by a competent person. The trouble is that the law never spells out a licence or a certificate number you can ask to see. The Health and Safety Executive guidance HSG258, ‘Controlling Airborne Contaminants at Work’, defines competence as the right knowledge, capability and experience for the job in hand - and no more than that.
That leaves a genuine question every duty holder faces: do you put your faith in the person with the formal qualification, or the person with years on the tools? In practice you want both, but it helps to understand what each side brings and where each falls short. Below we weigh the two so you can judge an examiner properly rather than taking a logo on a report at face value.
The industry benchmark is the BOHS P601, ‘Thorough Examination and Testing of Local Exhaust Ventilation Systems’. It is a four-day programme of roughly 24 hours of learning, and candidates are expected to already know the contents of HSG258 before they sit it. It sits alongside sister modules - P600 on test methods, P602 on design, P603 on RPE and P604 on commissioning - so a serious examiner often holds more than one.
A qualification tells you the tester has been assessed against a known standard by an independent body rather than simply marking their own homework. It matters because the P601 is not a legal requirement, yet the HSE strongly encourages every LEV tester to hold it, and membership bodies such as ILEVE (the Institute of Local Exhaust Ventilation Engineers) build on that same foundation.
Pros
Cons
The second half of competence is time served. A tester who has examined hundreds of systems has seen how extraction really behaves - a kitchen canopy pulling against a fire damper, a spray booth losing face velocity as filters load, a grinding bench where the hood was moved six months ago and never checked. That pattern recognition is hard to teach and only comes from repetition.
This is why BOHS states plainly that carrying out unsupervised statutory testing needs appropriate workplace experience ‘in addition to’ the qualification. Experience is what turns a set of anemometer readings into a judgement about whether your system genuinely controls exposure, and what a failure is actually telling you. If you want the detail of what that survey should cover, our guide on what a thorough examination and test means for LEV walks through it.
Pros
Cons
The honest answer is that neither option stands alone. HSG258 asks for knowledge, capability & experience together, and the strongest examiners pair a current P601 with years of real surveys and regular audits of their own work. When you appoint a tester, ask three simple things: who exactly will attend and what do they hold; how much recent LEV testing they have done in a setting like yours; and whether their reports give you clear, benchmarked measurements rather than a bare pass or fail. A competent person will answer all three without hesitation.
Questions
No. COSHH Regulation 9 requires only that a competent person carries out the thorough examination and test, and it does not name any single qualification. However, the HSE strongly encourages every LEV tester to hold the BOHS P601, and it has become the recognised industry benchmark. Most reputable providers will hold it as a minimum.
Experience is essential, but on its own it is not enough. BOHS is clear that competence needs appropriate workplace experience in addition to the underlying knowledge, because a tester needs to interpret readings correctly, not just take them. The safest choice pairs a current qualification with years of hands-on surveys and regular auditing of that work.
Ask who will attend and what qualifications they personally hold, then verify a P601 against the BOHS register. Ask how much recent testing they have done on systems like yours, and check that their reports show benchmarked measurements against design figures rather than a simple pass or fail. A genuinely competent examiner will answer all of this openly.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix examines and tests local exhaust ventilation to HSG258 and COSHH - measured, reported and certificated, UK-wide.