Work or equipment element ? Rules for your professional installations

Can the ten-year warranty apply to professional technical equipment?

The decision Cass. 3rd civ., September 25, 2025, n° 23-18.563 Published in the Bulletin, confirms a well-established rule: as soon as an equipment is considered as a "work", it no longer falls under article 1792-7 of the Civil Code, even if it is used only in a professional setting.

In this case, the Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeal, which had ruled that the renovation work on the refractory lining of a gas boiler, ovens, and ducts in an ammonia production unit constituted a construction project.

Why? Because the work involved heavy masonry techniques: demolition, bricklaying, anchoring, application of successive mortars...

The Court clearly stated that the nature of the work, and not their industrial use, is decisive. Once classified as a construction project, these works cannot be considered as mere equipment elements within the meaning of Article 1792-7.

It specifies: "Having determined that this work constituted, in itself, a structure within the meaning of Article 1792 of the Civil Code, the Court of Appeal correctly concluded that it did not fall within the scope of the equipment referred to in Article 1792-7 of the same code. " (Cass. 3rd civ., Sept. 25, 2025, No. 23-18.563, published in the Bulletin)

This decision reinforces a constant jurisprudence: the fact that a piece of equipment is exclusively professional is not enough to exclude the ten-year warranty. What matters is its material and functional integration into the construction, not its economic purpose.

Professional destination: a criterion now without effect on the ten-year guarantee.

The decision of September 25, 2025 is therefore part of a coherent logic: the exclusively industrial destination of an installation (such as an ammonia unit, a power plant or a data center) is not a criterion for excluding the ten-year guarantee, as long as the work carried out constitutes a construction.

The Court thus neutralizes the restrictive scope of Article 1792-7 of the Civil Code, which only concerns detachable equipment elements intended exclusively for professional use, and not the works themselves.

In other words, as soon as there is work, there is no longer 1792-7.

This analysis applies to heavy industrial installations (refractory coatings, overhead cranes, pipelines, technical pathways) as well as integrated energy equipment (photovoltaics, structural heat pumps, thermal systems).