Until very recently, if you wanted to carry out any plumbing or engineering work on a gas appliance in the United Kingdom, you had to be registered with an organisation known by the acronym of CORGI, which stood for the Council Of Registered Gas Installers. The government obviously felt that this organisation was no longer up to the task in hand, as they abolished the whole set up in favour of a new organisation called the Gas Safe Register, which is operated by a private company known as Capita Gas Registration under license from the British government’s Health and Safety Executive. This new arrangement came into being after a government review of the existing gas safety infrastructure in 2006.

The role of this new body is to provide an easily accessible register of all the qualified and registered gas plumbers and engineers in the country, so that anyone who is not qualified or able to carry out work on potentially lethal gas appliances can be easily identified by the consumer.

You could well ask why you need to use a Gas Safe registered engineer. Well, the standard of gas works carried out in your home is vitally important to the safety of yourself and your family. Poorly maintained gas appliances can cause lethal explosions, or release a gas called Carbon monoxide, an odourless, colourless, deadly poison, into the enclosed atmosphere of the home. Anyone fixing or installing gas appliances such as boilers, hobs, ovens or fires therefore has to be fully qualified, and have the standard of their work verified on a regular basis by the Gas Safe Register.

One of the main benefits of the new system is that you can now very easily verify the qualifications of your engineer. The Gas Safe website has details of all of their registered engineers and their companies. To check whether an engineer you have already chosen is registered, simply log on to the Gas Safe Register website where you can use the Check An Engineer option to see whether your chosen engineer is on the system. The online information will let you know exactly what your engineer is qualified for, so that you can check whether it is safe to hire them to carry out specific work in your home. Be sure to check your engineer’s ID card too as this will also tell you exactly what kind of work the engineer is entitled to carry out.

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