F-Gas compliance guides

Who these are for

If you have air conditioning, refrigeration or heat pump plant on business premises, somebody is legally the operator of that equipment. Frequently that person does not know it is them.

These guides are for:

• Facilities managers who have inherited plant and a folder that may or may not be a compliance record.
• Building owners and landlords whose tenants use equipment they own.
• Small business owners with a few split systems who have never been told any of this applies.
• Managing agents carrying the duty on behalf of a client.
• Anyone preparing for an inspection, a sale, or a lease event where this will be looked at.

Start here, depending on where you are

The mechanism, in one paragraph

Fluorinated gases are potent greenhouse gases, so the regime works by attaching a carbon-dioxide-equivalent figure to each one. Multiply the refrigerant charge in a system by that gas’s global warming potential and you get the system’s CO2e. Your obligations – whether you must have leak checks at all, and how often – follow from that number rather than from the physical size of the equipment.

Which is why two systems that look identical can have entirely different duties attached, and why the refrigerant type matters as much as the charge size.

• Leak check frequency and CO2e – how to work out your own figure and the schedule that follows.
• What the regulations actually cover – the scope, in plain English.
• The refrigerant phase-down – what the tightening supply of higher-GWP gases means for plant you already own.

Records, which is where most non-compliance actually sits

In our experience the equipment is usually fine. The records are the problem – missing, incomplete, held by a contractor who has been replaced, or in a form that proves nothing.

A compliant record is not a pile of service sheets. It has to establish, for each system, what gas and how much, who did what and when they were qualified to do it, what was found, and what was added or recovered.

• What an F-Gas logbook must contain – the specific items, and the common gaps.
• F-Gas for facilities managers – a routine that keeps it current rather than reconstructing it annually.
• Decommissioning – recovery, records and disposal, which is a duty that persists after the equipment leaves.

The practical test: if an inspector asked today, could you produce the record for every system on site, without phoning anyone? If not, that is the gap.

Enforcement

F-Gas enforcement covers who checks and what non-compliance costs. The short version is that it is enforced, the penalties are meaningful, and the operator is who they come to.

It also surfaces at moments nobody plans for – a building sale, a lease assignment, an insurance review, or a due diligence exercise. Records that were never kept cannot be created retrospectively.

See also F-Gas compliance, planned maintenance and the air conditioning guides.