My father owns a car wrecking yard. In all the trade magazines, the
Refrigerant Licencing authority ere making a huge song and dance that all car Ac's must be properly recovered and that records from a licenced person must be kept or the owner of the yard is liable for $250K fines. This put the wind up the old fella who likes to do things by the book. He usually just leaves the AC units intact. He unbolts the compressor from the engine, wires it to one side and takes what he wants. Rarely does he get call for ac components and the ones he needs he takes from cars that have no gas due to collision damage or lack of maintence.
Feeling edgy about all the hoo haa, he rang the 3 licenced guys in his small town and none of them were remotely interested in coming and de gassing his vehicles. The universal reply was they were all flat out with more profitable work and couldn't put that off to come de gass cars.
He showed me the gloom and doom ads which made much to do about the fact they had intorduced a new licence which is a " Restricted
Refrigerant Recovery". Its so scrapyards and the like can have trained, licenced persons on hand to properly recover the refrigerant and it can then be disposed of properly. I looked on the website and got basic but highly lacking info on the licence. I downloaded the study materials and had them down pat in about an hour. Pretty straightforward stuff. I watched lots of YT vids on the subject and was pretty confident with it all. Not exactly rocket surgery. This was exactly one year ago and the licencing mob were closed over the christmas NY break so I had to wait to contact them to find out more.
When I did, it was like I was the first person to ever ask about it. I got duckshoved from pillar to post because everyone knew what I was talking about, they just knew nothing about how to go about being licenced , what it required or who looked after it.
Finally I made it all the way to the top and got the head pencil pusher.
Cut a real long story short, I was in fact the first pelican to ever ask about it ( They had only been promoting this licence 2.5 years) and there was no actual course, test, or other measure of aptitude. It was as mentioned above, someone fully licenced basicaly signed off that you knew what you were doing and that was it.
I looked up and spoke to the head guy of the Tech colledge that teaches AC and asked about tthe course. He said there wasn't one. I said it's on your website and gave him the course number and told him this is how I found you. He looked it up as Ispoke to him and was clearly shocked. He said he had been head of the department for 13 years and had never heard of the course. He was even more shocked that it had an official course number and he was the one that was supposed to sign off on that and the cirriculum. The guy got back to me several time and we discussed things and he was always apologetic at the same time clearly not happy his name was on something he kneww nothing about.
The upshot was still no joy and no way for me to get training and a licence.
I found a friend of a friend of a fri... that had a refrigeration business that dealt with industrial/ commercial stuff like meat packing plants and shopping centres. I gave him a call and sent him links to the " Private" part of the licencing mobs web site where supposedly all the info for the Training I'd need would be. He went there and found nothing. Turned out this guy is someone in another industry association and he got in touch with the head Gubbermint monkey and asked what the go was. He was not impressed when the guy said " Give him the once over and if he knows what he's doing you can sign off on him and I'll fix up his licence." When friends friend asked exactly what that was, he couldn't get a straight answer.
As he got back to me and explained, he had a big business riding on his licence. If he signed off on me and then something happened and they came back to him, without any actual documented criteria or testing parameters, he was a sitting duck.
He also gave the Gubbermint bloke both barrels over it and took him to task saying they are making this big fuss of do the right thing but then when people like myself want to, they are in an abyss.
It is bloody stupid and typical gubbermint stupidity.
I can go and buy all the gear I need without a licence but I can't give the recoverd refrigerant back to the collection places without a licence. This set the guy I was talking to off as well because as he said, that defeats the whole **** purpose of recovering the gas in the first place, to keep it out of the environment. He said forget about how it was recovered, if someone is taking it to the right place to be disposed of correctly, it should be thanks very much, no questions asked not potentialy call the cops and turn the stuff away to be vented or dumped somewhere.
I looked at things last september and still nothing had changed. I was thinking I'll give the licenceng guy a call in a few weeks and see if anything has been done since.
Since this, I spoke to a lawyer friend of mine about it as to where my father stood. He said he hasn't a thing to worry about. Basicaly the law is impossible for him to comply with. No one in the area will do the work, I have well documented evidence that I tried to become licenced and there are not criteria or way to obtain that licence. That being the case, he said the chances of them actualy persuing anything would be a million to one and if they were stupid enough to take it to court, it would get dropped in 10 sec because of the political and environmental backlash it would cause.
I also looked up some records and found that NO ONE has been procecuted for venting gas from vehicles or refigerators, AC etc. The only procecutions that did happen in 2013 were all for Very large scale breaches where hundreds of KG of gas was vented, dumped or Ilegally imported.
My father no longer worrys. I bought some equipment and I do recover some gas. We put it in other vehicles that need the AC topping up. The rest stays in the cars and gets passed onto the scrappy and no doubt gets vented to atmosphere when the car is crushed. The law says my father can't vent the gas which he's not doing so is in the very gray but very low risk area of getting prosecuted if they were stupid enough to try.
I would actualy like to get licenced and make a business out of de gassing vehicles. There are loads of yards around me and there is no way the gas is being recovered from those vehicles. If the law wasn't such a Giant arse and the rules were enforced and there was a way for people to legaly get a restricted recovery licence, then this could be a good business and save the environment from a lot of stress. I don't have any friends that can sign off for me to get a licence and there are no tech courses available. The people I have spoken to have been all very helpful and unhappy at the situation but without a proper structured course or tesing parameters, there isn't a way to protect themselves when signing off for me under the current idiotic and lacking system.
Atm it's nothing but lip service and seen to be doing the right thing while doing nothing at all.
Originally Posted by mattinthehat
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