What the F-Gas Regulation actually requires
The EU F-Gas Regulation places a legal liability on anyone operating air conditioning or refrigeration equipment to ensure refrigerant does not leak, and is recovered properly during servicing and replacement of systems, in order to limit refrigerant emissions to the atmosphere.
In practice, that means your air conditioning plant needs to be professionally monitored and maintained by engineers qualified to current industry standards — not just serviced when something breaks.
The 5% threshold
Best-available techniques should keep the relative loss of refrigerant below a maximum of 5%. Any used refrigerant that isn't intended for re-use has to be treated as waste and disposed of safely — it can't simply be vented or discarded.
Leak detection starts at installation
Good practice doesn't begin when a fault appears — it starts on day one. Every installation should be properly tested in accordance with BS EN378, with pressure testing carried out to confirm the system is genuinely leak-tight before it's ever switched on for the client.
Beyond compliance: protecting your business
Treating F-Gas compliance as a box-ticking exercise misses the point. A full system analysis — not just a leak repair — protects a business against equipment breakdowns, regulatory penalties and rising energy costs, because a system that's leaking refrigerant is also a system working harder than it should be.
What about older R22 systems?
Where a system is beyond economical repair, or still runs on the now-phased-out R22 refrigerant, replacement is usually more cost-effective than continued patching. A competitively priced replacement, installed with minimum disruption, also brings the added benefit of modern, more efficient refrigerants like R410A.
