E-newsletter December 2020
Dear Colleague
Please take a look at this month's CIBSE Certification Newsletter.
Good news for Air Conditioning Inspectors
MHCLG have published their response to the consultation on Changes to The Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012, No. 3118.
The interesting bit for Air Conditioning Inspectors can be found on page 19 paras 18 and 19. The 12kW threshold for inspection is being retained. The whole report is worth a read.
There was a significant response to this consultation and well done to anyone that responded. We lobbied hard on this in partnership with the other Schemes, through PEPA, and CIBSE responded in a supportive way as well pointing out that during a pandemic was not a good time to cut back on air conditioning system advice. The bottom line is that the Government is listening. I hope this will encourage participation in future consultations affecting our industry.
Other Air Conditioning news
Sterling software will be offline for maintenance at the following times:
5pm on Friday 11 December 2020 to 9am on Monday 14 December 2020 and then again from 5pm on Friday 18 December to Monday 21 December 2020.
During these periods you will not be able to generate the xml for lodgement.
Guidance for addressing on the new MHCLG register
We have been asked to remind everyone that:
- You should not be using UPRNs from old certificates, for example last year’s DEC.
- The <UPRN> field must only ever be populated with an address ID that has been retrieved from the register.
- If the property cannot be found in the address search results then the <UPRN> element should be omitted from the XML, i.e. left blank
- Although the lodgement will still go through at the moment with something entered into the UPRN field that is not “official”, MHCLG will be introducing a check on that field that will block the lodgement in future.
Also:
- The address fields are what appears on the certificate - the assessor can change this as long as the submitted address still recognisably relates to the property that the UPRN belongs to.
- So an assessor can find the relevant address ID from the address search, put it in the <UPRN> field, and is then free to adjust the address lines to make things more cosmetically pleasing, e.g. they can:
- Change the address text to lowercase
- Delete duplicated address lines
- Add missing address lines
- The <UPRN> should still be included after these cosmetic changes are made for display on the certificate page.
The register is not trying to exactly match the address as before as long as it relates to the right property. This allows for this sort of address correcting by you.
CPD
A reminder about keeping your CPD record up to date. We will be conducting our annual CPD audit in the New Year and the easiest way of making sure that this has no impact on you is to ensure that your CPD record for 2020 is up to date and complies with the CIBSE Certification requirements.
Update your CPD record
Renewals
For those of you requiring to reinstate your registrations please contact the Certification team at epc@cibsecertification.org and we will work with you in completing any compliance requirements needed.
Certification Code of Conduct
We will suspending on 5 January 2021 any registrant that has not yet submitted a signed Certification Code of Conduct. To avoid suspension please download the Code of Conduct from the Certification website and return a signed copy to epc@cibsecertification.org so we can update your profile.
End of year closure
The CIBSE Certification office will be closed from 17:00 on Tuesday 24 December and will re-open at 09:00 on Monday 4 January 2021.
During this period we will be periodically monitoring emails only, so if you have any technical or lodgement queries, or need to provide new insurance details please email epc@cibsecertification.org Please bear in mind that response times may be longer than usual.
Lodgement credits can be purchased online at all times but are allocated to the individual account only. Bulk purchases (for company accounts) for lodgements that you may want to make during the closure period will need to be made before 12:00 on 24 December 2020.
PEPA Resource kit
The latest version of the PEPA COVID-19 Resource Kit is now on their website:
PEPA Resource Kit v4
Kind regards,
Professor Andrew Geens
BEng (Hons) PhD CEng FCIBSE
Head of CIBSE Certification Ltd.