Adam Collins – self-employed Gas Engineer and Nest Pro – looks at how the industry can tackle unsafe and illegal gas installs.
You have more chance of finding a four-leaf clover than a gas engineer who doesn’t like a moan. But behind those moans, other than the fact you have to pay for coffee in merchants, there’s a great deal of sense.
The industry has changed massively since I started my training in 1998 and completed college in 2001.
In other countries – such as Germany, Australia, America ETC – plumbers and gas engineers are held in the same esteem as people who have degrees, as they recognise the amount of hard work that goes into such a complex and varied industry.
Having worked briefly in Australia whilst travelling, I can vouch for this to be true. I couldn’t walk onto a building site without proving myself to the head plumber.
The same however, cannot be said of the quality control in this country. I’ve stood in merchants countless times when people in need of a good wash and shave have bought a boiler, and driven off in a clapped-out estate car.
It’s all very well selling that product to those guys, but what if the job does go wrong? The best-case scenario is the house gets flooded, the worst case is people die of carbon monoxide poisoning or the house blows up.
I may be being melodramatic here, but why aren’t people getting harsh prison sentences for gas-related crimes, rather than suspended sentences in a lot of cases?
If I built a bomb and bombed your house, would I not be on a murder charge? How are these “boiler installers/builders” not?
Gas Safe Register has run its umpteenth campaign informing the customer to always ask for the card, as they want to cut down on illegal installers.
Why are they putting the onus on the customer to do the policing of our industry, surely that isn’t Joe public’s job?
I suggested to Gas Safe via Twitter to make it illegal to sell all gas products to non-registered persons. I also suggested the addition of a magnetic strip to our Gas Safe cards, so the sale of the boiler could be logged centrally and registered at point of sale also to see if we were registered to carry out such work.
This would stop illegal and unsafe installs overnight.
