About

About LEV Academy

LEV Academy was born with the support of Bill Cassells of Oxyl8, who regularly referred his P601 and P602 delegates to me for mentoring. It quickly became clear that many delegates were leaving formal training with a significant lack of confidence, despite having passed their courses. I began working closely with them to build both understanding and confidence, often inviting them to shadow me on real work to see how LEV testing and problem-solving is carried out in practice. The results spoke for themselves, and the demand for mentoring continued to grow. From there, LEV Academy developed naturally in response to that need.

Intro

Real-world LEV training and tools from someone who's still out there doing the job every day.

My name is Louise Davies-Wood. I’m a full-time LEV practitioner with over 22 years on the tools – designing, installing, testing, commissioning, and fixing local exhaust ventilation systems for factories, in the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and United States of America.

Everything you’ll find here – the courses, the guides, the labels, the Pitot tubes I sell – is stuff I actually use myself, week in, week out, while working for my dad’s company, Airducts, in the Midlands UK.

There’s no corporate fluff, no recycled PowerPoint slides, and definitely no “that’ll do” attitude. Just the practical, "been-there-fixed-that" (maybe the odd bodge) knowledge in which I was fortunate to have from my mentor, my Dad.

Meet Louise

I never planned to do this for a living.

As a teenager I swore I’d never work for my dad but life had other ideas.

When Dad’s health took a turn, I started helping him on site doing LEV tests on my days off from retail. One day turned into every day off … and then into leaving my old job completely and joining Airducts full-time.

Twenty two years later I’m still here – testing, servicing and designing systems, crawling through factories, drilling the holes myself, writing the reports, and failing systems when they need failing (because workers’ lungs don’t care if the client likes you).

Along the way I’ve been lucky enough to learn from some of the old-school legends of the LEV world (most of them now retired), sat the full suite of P-Certs, became a BOHS-approved tutor, co-founded LEV Central, and somehow ended up with my own little corner of the internet teaching the next generation the stuff you never get shown on a training course. Of course beating to my own drum.

I still work full-time for Dad (Airducts Design & Engineering). I still get my hands dirty. And I still believe the best way to keep people safe is to give straight-talking, no-nonsense, genuinely useful training and tools to the people who are actually out there doing the job.

That’s what LEV Academy is.

If you’re an LEV examiner, designer, H&S manager, or just someone who wants their system to actually work properly first time … you’re in the right place.