One of the most critical items of the whole system of Regulations, Decrees and Provisions that concern the refrigeration technician’s profession is the certification that enables to the handling of fluorinated gases. It has been established and it has been mandatory since 2013 and, with the coming into force of F-gas Registers and of the Data Bank, it has become even more binding because only the subjects provided with this certification can register the technical activities regarding these gases, operations of plant installation, of refrigeration circuit maintenance, of leak search and input of additional gas into plants for the most various reasons (connection of subsystems, modification, top up in the event of leaks and so on).
Well, let us get this straight right away: this qualification is not the qualification for the profession, but only and exclusively the certification that allows using a kind of gas: the technical regulation that defines what competences the refrigeration technician is expected to have is another, UNI EN 13313, today ISO 22712. The slang denomination of the F-gas certification as a license is already inaccurate in itself, even more so if we are talking about the licence of the refrigeration engineer: the refrigeration technician is able to use fluorinated gases, but he is asked to be able to do endless other things that the F-gas certification does not provide for. This confusion is perhaps one of the most serious defects that we have been carrying with us since 2013, precisely since when we have mistaken the certification exam for a professional suitability exam.
However, if this was the only problem, we might be (or better, we might have been) optimistic: actually, both the training and the exam have proven to be devaluing, because as time went by the bar was increasingly lowered and finally anyone who paid to be enrolled in the course was promoted, with a downward competition in terms of both content quality and of price that has transformed the certification into a practically useless piece of paper, because it was granted to anybody, and the failure rate in the exam barely reached 0.1% of candidates.
Even more depressive is the assessment made by some skilful and expert technicians who, having the role of examiners, were criticized by the organizers of courses and exam sessions for being too severe; besides, they received invitations that were not too implicit, on the contrary in some cases they were explicit indeed, not to issue failures. The situation induced the most reliable among them to give up carrying out the examiner’s task, because their role would have been reduced to the task entrusted to those who assigned the certification not according to acquired competence but due to the payment of a fee to an institution or association.
Mentioning names and surnames is not possible and would not be useful for the purpose because actually what we intend to denounce is the loss of credibility of an exam that, in its premises and in its structure, should have become discriminating between those who mastered the execution of certain things and those who were unable, but today the issue is getting complicated, and not to a negligible extent.
The article 10 of the new Regulation
The matter becomes even clearer if we analyse the text of the new F-gas Regulation: the “infamous” article 10 provides that refrigeration technicians must be trained in the matter of the environmental impact reduction, efficiency, safety and circular economy not only on fluorinated gases, but also on alternative gases to these, such as propane, carbon dioxide and ammonia.
Consequently, the certification scheme must change, because the refrigeration technician who will intend to practice the profession, once we will have an implementing Decree in Italy, will be asked to prove he is able to use not only fluorinated gases, but also the so-called natural gases in eco-compatible, efficient and safe manner.
Therefore, we must set up a new scheme and a new training programme to enable technicians to execute operations on the refrigeration circuit, in installation, maintenance, repair and dismantling phase. The issue has been topical for a long time now and we are urging the legislator as much as possible to avoid incurring the formal and substantial defects that have transformed the certification into a purely economic toll.
Where starting from
The first absolutely central point is a certification that really enables to the activity: this means that if the technician or the company carries out a basic activity, like for instance the installation of conditioning plants in split mode, the demanded competences are the necessary ones, neither more nor less in comparison with the requisites that protect technicians’ and users’ safety, permitting to install suitable equipment for carrying out the performance demanded, and the management is environmentally correct.
Therefore, minimal reference elements to UNI EN 378, to ATEX regulation, to the management of gas leaks and recovery must be introduced. These plant’s small size must not exempt the technician from carrying out his role as a protagonist, in all respects, for the reduction of the environmental impact and as a manager of the safe transition to a sustainable economy.
However, this means also another thing: if you are qualified to carry out basic activities, you cannot take on complex activities without getting trained and certified for higher levels of complexity, that is to say for applications that imply the use of more challenging technologies, more dangerous gases and more articulated instruments.
In practice, the certification must not be the same for all, but “proportioned” to the typology of activity carried out, to the difficulties to be faced and to the necessary competences to deal with them.
