Australian Refrigeration Council to include natural refrigerants in new accreditation scheme

A new accreditation scheme, currently under development, will be separate to the existing licencing structure, and will add guidelines for natural refrigerant training in Australia.

“What the ARC are doing is stepping outside their historical position, and embarking on putting in place an accreditation scheme, which incorporates key refrigerants that are not currently covered by the existing Ozone Depleting Substances and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (ARCTick) licence scheme,” said Glenn Evans, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Refrigeration Council at the ATMOsphere Australia 2017 conference.

“Initially, the refrigerants we’re looking at to be part of the scheme include: hydrocarbons, CO₂, ammonia, and class A2/A2L refrigerants.”

The new scheme is intended to help Australia’s industry respond to new refrigerants that are now being adopted in response to Australia’s HFC phase down.

“[It] will provide an up skilling pathway for technicians and assist in new technology and refrigerant uptake.”

Evans says that the ARC has received a large amount of interest in the new licencing scheme from technicians. He also hopes that this announcement may serve an important role in bringing the wider industry together to better prepare for the coming refrigeration technology changes.

“We’ve had upwards of two-hundred phone calls to the ARC saying, ‘when are you going to do this?’ So, there is a real grassroots swell, demanding this training,” says Evans.

“Hopefully [the technicians] will be better positioned to actually work in this field and support the uptake of new technology.”

At the time of this announcement, a time line for release of the new scheme was not specified.

Adding on to this, the ARC is making an effort to attract new people into the RAC industry in Australia through various media. A new careers video, for example, is going out to every secondary school in Australia, intended to raise the industry’s profile among young people and new graduates.

“The objectives of the video are to promote the RAC industry as a bona fide industry and to create a genuine profile of the industry,” says Evans.

“It is deliberately aspirational and uses terminology such as ‘climate control’ intended to engage and hook the modern generation.”

Background

The ARC is the RAC Industry Board, which administers the Australian refrigeration and air conditioning licence scheme on behalf of the Australian Commonwealth Government, with over 85,000 licenced individuals and businesses Australia-wide.