Warm Air Qualifications:

Technicians working on gas appliances are required by law to be “competent” for any work they are carry out. Not many people realise that being simply “Gas Safe Registered” is not necessarily sufficient. Each class of appliance and type of gas work (cookers, boilers, gas fires, LPG etc) requires a separate examination pass and qualification. Warm air heating is one such class requiring a specific exam pass and qualification.

There are dozens if not hundreds of categories of examination we Gas Safe Registered technicians (or engineers, as GSR insist on calling us) can take, each exam qualifying us to carry out the associated narrow and specific class of work within the field of gas engineering. We all carry an Identity card issued by GSR bearing our name, our photo and a list of categories of gas work we are qualified to perform, so anyone working on your gas appliance must be able to show they are qualified for that type of appliance and producing their the ID card is one way of doing this. 

Exam passes expire every five years and have to be renewed at significance expense, so each of us tends only to renew qualifications for the fields in which we regularly work. As ordinary radiator central heating systems are far more common than warm air, most gas technicians decide not to take the separate qualification required for warm air, so this has two effects. Firstly, it can be hard to track down a local gas technician qualified to work on yours, and secondly, when people who don’t realise this call in a regular non-warm air qualified technician to work on theirs, the technician feels a temptation (as they know they are not qualified to work on the appliance when they see it), to recommend removal and replacement with a new boiler and a radiator system. 

Should a technician not holding the warm air qualification (known as ACS - DAH1) decide to work on a warm air appliance anyway, she or he is classed as working “out of scope” which is no different from working unqualified, which it is in fact. Viewed by the authorities as worse as the technician will be fully aware they are breaking the law by working out of scope.

For how to find a local warm air technician, see my page here.

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