HV&P – 21/3/14
Installers will be legally required to record levels of flue gas carbon monoxide (CO) and the combustion ratio when commissioning condensing boilers, as of April 2014.
Part of new Benchmark Commissioning Checklists, these measures aim to protect installers by providing evidence that a newly installed boiler is left running safely and efficiently. The checklist must be left with the boiler, as Gas Safe Register will defect installations for non-compliance if the levels are not recorded.
Full details can be found in Gas Safe Register’s Technical Bulletin 143, issued in July 2013. However, Barry Atkins, managing director of PASS, the independent test equipment expert, has warned that many gas fitters and boiler engineers in the UK may still be unaware of the new mandatory regulations.
“The majority of homes in Britain have the potential to generate and emit harmful gasses into the environment from their heating systems,” Mr Atkins said. “A flue gas analyser allows a trained engineer to inspect the waste gasses being produced and correctly diagnose possible issues.”
There are a number of different constituents of flue gas, ranging from harmless gasses such as nitrogen, oxygen and water vapour, to far more hazardous chemicals such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Lee Robinson, UK customer service director at Baxi, has emphasised the dangers of CO – statistics from the Department of Health suggest that exposure to the gas is responsible for around 50 deaths, 200 hospital admittances and 4,000 low-level poisoning cases in the UK every year. Read more>>