F-Gas for facilities managers: a practical compliance routine

Set up once

1. Survey every system on siteWalk the building including the roof, plant rooms, cellars and comms rooms. Include refrigeration as well as air conditioning – cellar cooling and display cabinets are the classic omissions.
2. Give every system a permanent identifierA number or code, physically labelled on the unit as well as recorded. ‘The one on the roof’ stops working the moment a second one is installed.
3. Record type, charge, make, model, serial, location and install datePhotograph every nameplate while you are there.
4. Calculate CO2e per systemCharge times GWP. This is the number everything follows from.
5. Determine the required check frequency per systemAgainst the current thresholds. Record the calculation, not just the answer.
6. Identify where automatic leak detection is requiredOr where fitting it voluntarily would usefully extend the interval.
7. Create a logbook per systemWith a front sheet carrying the key facts and chronological entries after it.
8. Create a site summaryOne page listing every system with its next due date. This is what you actually look at.
9. Verify contractor certificationIndividual qualifications and company certification. Keep copies.

This is a day or so of work for a typical site and it is the foundation. Everything after it is maintenance of the register rather than creation of it.

Monthly, five minutes

• Look at the site summary. Anything due in the next two months?
• Book anything approaching due. Not on the due date – before it, so there is margin.
• Check anything overdue and chase it. A late check is your non-compliance, not your contractor’s.
• File any records received since last month, into the right system’s logbook.
• Note any new plant installed and add it to the register. New systems installed by a different contractor are the most common way a register goes out of date.

Five minutes a month is the entire ongoing burden, provided the setup was done properly.

After every visit

1. Get the record, per system, in a form you can keep.
2. File it in the right logbook.
3. Update the next due date on the site summary.
4. Act on any findings. A reported leak needs repairing without undue delay, and a re-check afterwards – and the re-check is an obligation, not a courtesy.
5. Question anything odd. Refrigerant added with no leak reported is a question worth asking.
6. Check the visit covered what it should. A maintenance visit is not automatically a leak check.

Annually

• Review the register against a physical walk-round. Has anything been added, removed or replaced?
• Recalculate CO2e for anything whose charge has changed.
• Check the thresholds and intervals against current guidance, because they change.
• Review contractor certification, which has expiry dates.
• Look at the leak history. Any system that has needed refrigerant more than once is a candidate for replacement rather than continued repair.
• Check leak detection systems have been verified as functioning.
• Review the replacement plan in light of refrigerant availability and price.
• Confirm somebody other than you knows where all this lives.

Making it survive people

This is the part that determines whether the routine lasts, and it is the part most often neglected.

1. Records in a shared system, not on one person’s drive or in one person’s inbox.
2. The site summary visible to more than one person.
3. Due dates in a shared calendar or a CAFM system, not in somebody’s head.
4. A written procedure, even a single page, describing what happens and when.
5. Named deputy who knows where everything is.
6. Included in handover checklists when a facilities manager changes.
7. Included in contractor handover when a maintenance contractor changes – and the logbooks requested formally from the outgoing contractor.
8. Referenced in the lease or management agreement where responsibility might otherwise be ambiguous.

The test: if you left tomorrow, would the next person find this and continue it? If the honest answer is no, the routine has an expiry date regardless of how well it is currently running.

What to hand over

The contractor handover is the one most often mishandled. Those are your records as operator, you are entitled to them, and the moment to ask is before the relationship ends rather than afterwards.