F-Gas Record Keeping for UK HVAC Companies: What the Rules Actually Require

The letter is polite. The Environment Agency would like to see your records. And somewhere between the first van and the third, F-Gas record keeping went from a folder you meant to sort out to a stack of paper job sheets split across the office, two gloveboxes and the memory of an engineer who left in March. This guide is the plain-English version of what the GB F-Gas rules actually require a UK HVAC or refrigeration business to record. Every requirement below is checked against the government's own guidance, and where a threshold is technical we state it only because we verified it. It is the deeper companion to our HVAC software page: that page covers the day-to-day tooling, this one covers the paperwork the law expects, and how working firms keep it without hiring an administrator.

The shape of the regime, in one minute

Great Britain kept its own version of the F-Gas rules after leaving the EU. The guidance that matters to a working firm sits on gov.uk under titles like "Record F gas in equipment you own or service" and "Checking F gas equipment for leaks". The rules cover fluorinated greenhouse gases, which for an HVAC business mostly means the HFC refrigerants in the systems you install and service.

Two structural points before any numbers.

First, the thresholds are not measured in kilograms of refrigerant. They are measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent: the charge in the system multiplied by the global warming potential of the gas inside it. The same five kilograms can land in different bands depending on the refrigerant, so you need to know the gas, not just the charge.

Second, the rules see two hats. The operator is whoever controls the equipment day to day, usually your client. The contractor is you. Both hats carry record duties, which is why "the client keeps the paperwork" has never been a complete answer.

What must be recorded, per system

The duty triggers when equipment contains F gas equivalent to 5 tonnes of carbon dioxide or more. For that equipment, the government's guidance says the records must cover:

• the quantity and type of gas in the equipment when it was installed
• the quantity and type of any gas added during maintenance, including after a leak repair
• the dates and results of the mandatory leak checks
• whether any gas used was recycled or reclaimed, with the name, address and certificate number of the facility it came from
• the measures taken to recover and dispose of the gas when the equipment reaches end of life
• for operators, the name, address and certificate number of the companies that install, service or decommission the equipment

Records must be kept for five years, and that duty falls on the service company as well as the operator. The Environment Agency can ask to see them during an inspection.

Five years is longer than it sounds. It is longer than most firms keep an engineer, longer than many keep a job-sheet format, and comfortably longer than anyone keeps a whiteboard.

Leak checks: the frequency bands

The leak-check intervals are set by the size of the charge, in CO2 equivalent. From the gov.uk guidance:

• 5 tonnes CO2 equivalent up to 50: a leak check at least every 12 months
• 50 up to 500: at least every 6 months
• 500 or more: at least every 3 months

Fit an automatic leak detection system and the allowed interval doubles at each band. At 500 tonnes CO2 equivalent and above, a detection system stops being optional and becomes a requirement, with narrow exceptions for some older switchgear. Hermetically sealed systems that are labelled as such and sit below 10 tonnes CO2 equivalent fall outside the mandatory bands.

Notice what this means commercially. The law has already written a service schedule for every sizeable system on your books. Those check dates are recurring, mandatory appointments with your name on them, and every one produces a record you must keep for five years. A firm that treats leak checks as a compliance nuisance is leaving a maintenance contract lying on the plant room floor.

Who has to be qualified

The engineer qualification categories, again from the government's guidance:

• Category 1 covers the lot: installation, servicing, maintenance, leak checking, recovery and decommissioning on any size of system
• Category 2 covers installation, maintenance, servicing and recovery on systems holding less than 3kg of F gas, or less than 6kg if hermetically sealed
• Category 3 covers recovery only, on those same smaller systems
• Category 4 covers leak checking, provided the engineer does not break into the refrigeration circuit

Every individual handling F gas needs their own qualification, even when employed by a certified firm. Which category each engineer holds is itself a fact worth keeping on file, because it decides who you can send to which job. Dispatching a Category 3 engineer to a job that needs the circuit opened is not a scheduling error. It is a compliance failure with your company's name on it.

The business itself needs certification too

If your company installs, services, maintains, repairs or decommissions stationary equipment containing F gas that someone else operates, the company itself must hold F-Gas company certification. That includes sole traders. To get it, you show among other things that you employ enough qualified people for the work you take on, and that you have written procedures for handling the gas and minimising emissions. Certification comes from an approved body such as REFCOM, the F-Gas Register run by Quidos, or Bureau Veritas, and it renews every three years. A firm servicing only its own equipment sits outside this net, but that is not the firm reading this.

The week it all falls apart

Now the version nobody writes guidance for. Three vans. Paper job sheets, mostly filled in. The F-Gas records exist, in the sense that every one of them was written down somewhere at the time: a job sheet in a glovebox, a carbon copy in the office tray, a spreadsheet whose filename ends in FINAL2, and the rest in the head of whoever did the work. Then the letter arrives. Or a client's facilities manager asks for the leak-check history on their sites for the last three years, this week, because their own auditor is asking them.

Count the real cost. It is rarely enforcement first. It is a day and a half of archaeology by the one person who understands the filing, in the busiest fortnight of the year. It is the quiet damage of a commercial client watching you struggle to produce evidence for work you genuinely did. Contracts go out to tender on that impression. You did the work. You paid for the gas. The record just could not be found on the day it was worth money.

Gas teams will recognise the shape: it is CP12 renewals slipping through a paper diary, which we covered in how gas teams stop expiry dates slipping. Electrical firms live it with EICR paperwork, covered in EICR record keeping for electrical teams. Different certificates, same disease. The record was made once, on paper, in motion, and never landed anywhere findable.

What good F-Gas record keeping looks like

The fix is not a better filing cabinet. It is a habit: the record gets made where the work happens, against both the piece of equipment and the customer, at the moment of handling. Gas in, gas recovered, the system reference, the date, the result of the check, a photo of the nameplate. And the next check date is computed at that same moment and surfaces on its own later, because a date in a drawer is not a reminder. It is a fact waiting to become a problem.

This is where OptiTech Automation fits, and it is a deliberately narrow fit. It keeps job-level F-Gas records: refrigerant added and recovered, system references, dates and results, engineer notes and photos, held against each job and each customer so the trail is one search away when someone asks. Next-service and next-check dates are kept on file on every plan. Automatic reminder sends are part of the Growth plan; on Standard, at £599 a month plus £249 setup for up to 15 people on the tools, the dates and records are all still there, they just do not chase you by themselves.

And the honest line, which matters more in a compliance post than anywhere else: none of this makes anyone compliant. Your engineers hold their qualification categories. Your business holds its company certification. The legal duty to check, record and keep never moves to a software company, ours or anyone else's. Software keeps the evidence tidy and the dates visible, nothing more. If your paperwork discipline is already genuinely good and your systems are few, a well-kept spreadsheet meets the law just as well, and we would be the wrong purchase this year.

For the rest of the tooling around the same work, planned servicing, booking and dispatch, see the HVAC software page. For how online booking works across the trades generally, the plain-English guide walks through it without asking you to book a demo.

Sources: the gov.uk guidance pages "Record F gas in equipment you own or service", "Checking F gas equipment for leaks", "Qualifications to work with F gas" and "Company certification to work with F gas". If a requirement is not in one of those, we have not claimed it.