Why is Maintenance so important?

Updated May 17, 2022

Well‐maintained playground equipment can help children to develop cognitively, physically, communicatively, socially, and emotionally in a safer environment. Along with helping to promote children’s development, a quality maintenance program has many positive outcomes.

• Protect your investment: Play equipment, protective surfacing, planning, and site development of a playground are significant investments. It simply makes good economic sense to maintain the equipment to extend its life and protect your school or agency’s investment.

• Manage risk: Proper, routine, and timely maintenance is a way of managing risks in the community’s play areas, helping to protect them from costly accidents, and demonstrating the community’s standard of care.

• Improve children’s play experiences: When playground equipment is broken or otherwise unusable, children miss opportunities for play. That moment of connection with others and fun‐filled learning might be lost. The better maintained the equipment, the better the chance that a child’s life is improved. Your work could make the difference!

• Promote community values: Maintained and groomed play environments are a source of pride for the community. Taking good care of the playground equipment and maintaining a beautiful environment is an expression of your community’s values.

• Control expenses: Timely, preventive routine maintenance procedures help control expenses by reducing upkeep and replacement costs, enabling more accurate budgeting.

Because play equipment and surfacing are subject to changes from use, abuse, and climate, they must be inspected on a regular basis. The frequency of inspection will be determined by many factors including equipment age, usage, and materials and external factors like the age of the users, climate, and vandalism. A comprehensive maintenance plan will check for things like worn swing seats and swing hangers, loose bolts, cracks in plastic or deck coating and depth of safety surfacing.

Download GameTime's FREE Maintenance Checklist.

Don’t be overwhelmed! Struthers Recreation can help you develop a site specific maintenance plan for your playground. Also, we can send you a playground maintenance guide that includes check lists. To request a copy of the guide, please fill out the form below:

The information provided here is condensed from GameTime’s Playground Maintenance Guide.