Improving standards of safe refrigerant handling is usually portrayed as environmental measure – but it also has a crucial health and safety aspect, says Bob Towse, head of technical and safety at the HVCA.
This is another big year for the refrigeration and air conditioning sector.
Since February, new EU wide qualifications for the safe handling of refrigerant gases have been available. These are a key part of the F-Gas Regulations which seek to minimise the loss of potentially global warming refrigerant gas to the atmosphere.
By law, anyone handling F Gases in the UK must already hold a qualification, currently the City & Guilds 2078 or its CITB equivalent but by July 2011 they will be required to have the new City & Guilds 2079 qualification, or its CITB equivalent, to comply with EU law.
It is going to be touch and go whether the industry can train all of its 40,000 (approximately) engineers in time.
Also, in July this year it will become illegal to sell refrigerants to companies which are not on the industry's mandatory safe handling register which, it has just been confirmed, is to be managed by REFCOM, the company registration scheme set up by the HVCA.
Both these measures dramatically raise the professional bar for the RAC industry and should,
at least in theory, make it very difficult, if not impossible, for firms which do not invest in proper training to operate.
Firms will not be able to join the REFCOM register unless they employ qualified staff.
This can only be seen as a good thing. Untrained people have had a really negative impact on the running of systems and on their energy efficiency - and they also present a serious safety risk.
Very few industries would have put up with the level of system leakage the RAC sector has worked with for decades.
Can you imagine the aviation, petro-chemical or medical sectors allowing potentially harmful gases to escape in the quantities that have leaked over the years from refrigeration and air conditioning systems installed by poorly trained operatives?
The new qualifications apply to people who carry out leak checking of systems with more than 3kg charge (6kg if hermetically sealed), recovery, installation,as well as service and maintenance work.
These are all tasks the many high quality and professional firms within the industry have carried out safely and efficiently for years, but often they have found themselves competing for business with firms which do not train their installers and do not take their responsibilities seriously.
The City & Guilds and CITB examinations include an in-depth theoretical test covering subjects like basic thermodynamics, vapour compression cycles, and pressure enthalpy.
They also cover all major system components, ancillary components, controls, as well as messages related to climate change and modules designed to give the engineers a good working knowledge of the relevant legislation.
This is training designed to separate the men from the boys and the sheep from the goats - and so it should.
Refrigerant gases are not substances to be treated lightly or handled without care. All professional engineering firms working in the sector will welcome the fact that, at long last, there is a legally enforceable method of proving competence.
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