This scheme has no teeth and is very poorly implemented, prevouis people have commented correctly, in jobs for the boys, its about getting people trained and numbers, and not on the quality of the training and the future, its just about today, and now !
Most customers no nothing about F gas, and are not interseted in it, fines or no fines or even imprisonment is of no concern as they know there is no one to police the legistlation.
Why can nearly anyone walk into a refrigeration wholesaler and buy a bottle of refigerant, or even on line, some wholesalers will ask for id but thats it.
The F gas system is a joke that the honest contractor is funding and complying with, while many companies neither care or are interested in, and i know quite a lot of them, and thats there choice.
The system is nothing short of a half hearted attempt forced on us by the EU.
With the cuts in goverment / council budgets, there will be no one to enforce the legistlation or even be aware of its existstance.
As yet we have never been asked or been informed by a new customer of the fact that is the company or our engineers F gas certified or do we carry out F gas certification, and this is thousands of new customers over the last few years. when the customers have been informed with regard to F gas legislation they have stayed with there contractor who was not F gas certified through fear of the un-known, and do not want or care of the legislation or log books, certification.
Many of our customers have lost or do not care about there F gas log books and never keep there report sheets, leak test reports, refrigerant waste transfer notices together, and in a few cases we can not come back to site within one month to leak test after the repair work has been carried out, even though this has been already charged for in the original quote as they are too busy, or they say dont worry, we dont care.
We replace log books on average of about half of our customers once every year, at our expense and a lot of time photo copying the old report sheets to back date the new log book, and in one case the customer threw this straight in the bin and said please don t waste your time "its now filed"
In fact we have now stopped this proccess, as they customers are not interested until they have been inspected, and this will not happen for years and years if even ever, this mainly equates too small and meduim sized bussiness, and some large ones as well.
End users have too much to worry about surviving without more paperwork to file and comply too, there are too many more important legistlation to worry about.
On F gas training we have recently met on site two Polish lads who have been F gas certified, they can hardly speak English, and both were carpenters. They informed us that had been given a grant to pay for training when they got to this country a couple of months ago, and were informed that the F gas was an easy ride, and now are fully qualified F gas certified engineers, whats going on !!!!
Good luck to them for having a go and its not there fault the system failed, but whats happend to this industry its going down hill very fast indeed, and this is not the way to improve or indeed get our house in order as said over many years in the press !
F gas will need to be re-tailored to meet the industry needs and save us from years of poor quality F gas so called engineers. The damage has been done, it will take a long time to put this right.
The only way forward is with good long term apprentaships, and look forward to the long term benifits for this industry.
As a company owner we have job applicants sent to us all the time, and i can honestly say that we cannot tell who is qualified and who is not, there are so many courses out there. Short ones 2 weeks, six month & one year courses, two year courses, and dont get me started on all the different qualifications, what happend to just City & Guilds, its gone mad.
In the 30 years i have been in this industry the standard of workmanship and quality of the installations has taken such a nose dive, we have seen installations over the last two years that defy believe, and now see more wrongly installed or poorly installed equipment than ever before, but yet these contractors, engineers are qualified ?????? We dont know what in, as its not in air con, although the word con is very apt.
All i can say is iam glad i wont be here to see the state if this industry in another 15 years time, but it does concern me for the future engineers.
A very disheartened engineer and air con company owner.

I'm not surprised, and neither should most of the competent operators out in the uk.
Quite simply i have had enough of training, since 2004, i attained a citb safe handling, great idea renew every 3 years, id card to boot, the individual could every 3 years take the opportunity to refresh with updated industry standards, and be informed of all things new on the market surrounding refrigerants.

were is the course now?? finished, superseded by fixed system and mobile system qualification with c&g.

i took the c&g course last year which took less than a hour to demonstrate my ability.

now i have a certificate that i cant remember were it is, so i can not even show my a4 size paper badge if anyone wanted to see it, which thankfully no one has... its a joke, rip off cost to train, if it was so important then it should be mandatory and free paid by the government, 279 i paid for a hour!!!

4 modules for fixed and one for mobile, but all containing refrigerant, whats the difference between a fridge and a range rover?? more courses, more money...

you either know what you are doing or you don't..
weather operators care is another question, irrespective of modules ...

You can still by top up cans in motorist shops, so why should we bother about qualification, every summer there is hundreds of diy mechanics shoving a can of gas into there leaking mondeo just before they set of for there week in cornwall, for me i can face a criminal sentence if i vent my hoses to the atmosphere..
walk into any trade car parts counter and you can walk out with a 13.5 kg cylinder of 134a, along with a set of gauges .... why worry about a piece of paper???

its not illegal to sell, you have to be qualified to recover it, if it dose not need recovering then you are legal, that's what i was told in a garage last week....

if you can't buy gas without a certificate then people will soon get trained, whilst you can carry and buy gas without any form of training or certification, then who will worry???

i assume once the poor take up is reviewed then there will be a new qualification for us all to take again...

jobs for the boys.. nothing more..

"[Separately, I must say, choosing 'July' as a deadline date the peak of the aircon/refrigeration season -- has to be the most foolish time of the year for a deadline. Why not February or March, something like that, so engineers could get their training wrapped up when the workload is at its lowest, during the winter? I would suggest the gov extend this deadline until next Feb, and run future deadlines from that month of the year.]"
Ken, was this sprung upon us? NO, we had due warning, those leaving it to the deadline are the foolish ones. I have the right to gloat on this as I have in my hand Refcom Elite certificate number 1

This is just another money making scheme. The training methods are dependent on the training providers level of profit they wish to make per applicant ie they will use Mapp gas instead of Oxy accetylene. They wont pressurize system to the recommended level in order to save money on OFN.
Also a totally inexperienced engineer can pass this qualification and be deemed fit to carry out recovery/ recharge of systems, when in reality they still require supervision in the field. Finally the Fgas Regs are to be reviewed shortly what will be the outcome??? We shall wait and see.

Just like the destruction of the Twin World Trade Towers, NY are remembered as '9/11' this situation in our trade seems to be remembered, and made almost as important as '4/7'!

The farce of it is that there are probably many out there that don't make the time to read the trade press or any of the publications going through about all this legislation, and so don't bother with it. They are blissfully ambivalent!