Wet-Room Certification Records for Tilers: What to Log

Wet-room certification records for tilers come down to five things you capture while the room is still open: the substrate and fall check before you prime, the tätskikt (waterproofing) system by product name and batch number with the coats and drying times you actually used, photographs of every layer before tiling hides it, the joints, corners and penetrations shot individually, and a drain record showing make, age and clamping-ring fit. The certificate is not a form you fill in at the end; it is an assembly job. Capture the evidence as you work and the intyg takes ten minutes. Leave it in a phone gallery with three other bathrooms and it takes an evening, and it still has holes.

What a wet-room certificate actually is

In Sweden the document a tiler hands over is a kvalitetsdokument, colloquially a våtrumsintyg, issued under the industry rules for wet rooms. For ceramic tiling that means BBV — Byggkeramikrådets branschregler för våtrum. For plastic and vinyl coverings it is GVK (Golvbranschens våtrumskontroll). Pipework in the same room falls under Säker Vatten. Check byggkeramikradet.se, gvk.se and sakervatten.se before you quote: these rules get revised, and the version that applies is the one current when the work is done.

It is not an authority approval: Boverket's building regulations set the functional requirement, and the industry rules are the accepted way of meeting it. Nor is it a warranty. It is evidence that a named, authorised company built the room to a named, tested system on a given date. And you cannot issue one for work you did not do: if another firm laid the tätskikt, let them issue their own.

Who may issue one, and why homeowners now ask first

Under BBV, only a company holding BKR authorisation may issue the kvalitetsdokument, and the person doing the work must hold a valid waterproofing certificate for that system. GVK works the same way, and both bodies spot-inspect members' jobs. A certificate from an unauthorised firm has no standing.

The reason this has stopped being a formality: a wet room without complete documentation is a valuation problem at sale. A surveyor who finds a bathroom with no kvalitetsdokument writes it up as an unknown, usually with a remaining-life note that comes off the asking price. After a leak, insurers commonly cut or refuse compensation where the room cannot be shown to have been built to the branschregler in force at the time. Hence homeowners asking to see a sample certificate before they book.

The substrate and fall check

Do this before anything is primed. After the first coat you cannot prove it.

• Substrate type and condition. Concrete, screed, block or board — and which board, at what thickness, on what stud centres, against the maker's span table. A wall that flexes cracks the tätskikt, and no photo of finished tile shows that.
• Moisture. Concrete and screed must be dry to the supplier's stated limit, by the supplier's stated method. Record the reading, instrument, depth and date, not just "dry". If you inherit an RBK measurement, note whose it is.
• Fall to the drain. Inside the shower area BBV brackets it: enough to drain, not so steep it is unstable underfoot. The working range is roughly 1:150 to 1:50 — verify against the current BBV text. Elsewhere the point is no back-fall: water must never stand or run away from the drain.
• The drain itself. Make, model, age. BBV requires floor drains of pre-1990 manufacture to be replaced; newer drains may be kept only if the clamping ring matches your tätskikt system. Record the clearance from drain edge to finished wall — around 200 mm is the rule of thumb for clamping-ring access. Check the current requirement and the drain maker's instruction.

Photograph the level or fall gauge in place, drain in frame. A number in a table is a claim; the same number with a photo of the level reading it is proof.

The tätskikt system and its batch details

This is the part most certificates get thin, and the part an assessor reads first. The BBV principle is one tested system, from one supplier, used exactly as tested. You do not mix a primer from one maker with a membrane from another and a corner tape from a third. The moment you do, there is no system, and nothing to certify. Record, per room:

• System name, supplier and approval reference (type approval or P-marking), as printed on the pail.
• Every component by product name: primer, membrane, tape or fabric, corner pieces, drain and pipe collars, adhesive, grout and movement-joint sealant.
• Batch number for each component — the tillverkningssats on the tin, tube or roll. Photograph the label. That is how a supplier traces a bad batch, and how you prove you were not the problem.
• Quantity used and coverage rate, so the coats can be checked against the spec.
• Coat count and drying time between each, with real timestamps, plus room temperature and humidity if the system specifies a window. "Per manufacturer's instructions" is not a record. "Coat 1 at 09:20, coat 2 at 14:05" is.
• The wet zones covered, and where the membrane stops. A tiler who can show the height the membrane runs to behind the shower, and why, does not lose that argument later.

Photograph the layers before tiling covers them

No rule sets a minimum photo set, which is exactly the problem: what you fail to shoot is gone once the first tile goes on. A workable minimum, in build order:

1. Stripped substrate, walls and floor, wide; board fixings and stud centres, close.
2. Moisture meter reading in position, display legible.
3. Fall gauge or level at the drain, and from the shower position to the drain.
4. The drain, clamping ring loose, showing make and clearance.
5. Every batch label, close enough to read.
6. Reinforcing tape at every internal corner and the wall-to-floor junction, close.
7. Each pipe and mixer penetration with its collar bedded.
8. Membrane coat 1, then coat 2, wide, per wall and floor — a different coat colour makes it readable.
9. Drain collar bonded and clamping ring torqued down.
10. Finished tiling wide, plus movement joints and shower area close.

Around 25 to 35 frames per bathroom, ten minutes of work.

Joints, corners and penetrations

Failures cluster where the membrane is not flat. Each of these gets its own record line and photo:

• Internal corners and the wall-to-floor junction, reinforced per system, not just an extra brush of membrane.
• Every penetration: shower mixer, pipe tails, bath tap, extract duct, fixings for grab rails or glass. Each needs the system's collar or sleeve, photographed bedded before it is covered. If the plumber's work sits under Säker Vatten, cross-reference their document rather than certifying it.
• Movement joints: position, width, backing, sealant product.
• Anything fixed through the tiling afterwards, including who drilled it. One unsealed screw into a wet wall undoes the room, and if it was not you, your record should show the room intact at handover.

How to assemble the intyg without hunting through a phone gallery

The certificate is only hard if you build it backwards. The fix is structural.

1. Attach evidence to the job, not the phone. Gallery-first means matching 400 near-identical grey tile photos to four addresses later.
2. Use a fixed checklist in build order. A field that will not close without a photo captures the coat everyone forgets.
3. Photograph the batch label as you open the tin. Digits copied into a notebook get transposed; labels do not.
4. Timestamp automatically. Drying times only prove something if the times are real.
5. Work offline. Wet rooms are concrete boxes with no signal. If the tool needs a connection to save a photo, the record never gets made.
6. Generate the document from the record — checklist, readings, batch labels and photos in order, signed by the certificate-holder, on the authorised company's details. Retyping is where errors enter.
7. Keep a copy ten years at least. Claims and sale disputes arrive long after the invoice is paid, and the client's copy gets lost.

This is what a digital egenkontroll is for. In OdinTask the wet-room checklist is a protocol template on the job card: the fitter photographs each stage into the form in the offline field app, and the finished protocol comes out as a signed PDF next to the quote and invoice. No gallery, no evening reconstructing a room you can no longer see.

Wet-room certification records for tilers, stage by stage

If you are reading this outside Sweden

There is no direct equivalent of the kvalitetsdokument in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand or Australia: no trade body issues a wet-room certificate a surveyor expects to see. What exists instead is British Standard tiling practice (BS 5385, tanking to the membrane maker's instruction), the tanking supplier's warranty, and building control sign-off. The evidence requirement is identical; it just lands on you, not on a form. A tanking warranty is only worth something if you can show the correct primer, coat count and drying intervals for the batches you used. When an insurer or a purchaser's surveyor asks two years later, the tiler with the labelled photo set is fine and the tiler with a camera roll is not. Build the same folder, call it what you like.

If you want the checklist, photos, batch labels and signed PDF to come from the same place as the quote and invoice, start a free trial or read more on the blog.