Never has the gas industry had more administration responsibilities than at the present time. Hardly a days goes by without another form being made available for completion by the gas installer. Many of the forms are of course, necessary, but one wonders if so many are required and more importantly if there is a simpler and more cost effective method available to record and save essential information.
A quick look through the forms now available to the gas installer produced and unbelievable menu of documents that would require a bank of filling cabinets to archive.
Plant Inspection Record for Non Domestic Installations
Central Heating Survey Report
Report of an Injury or Dangerous Occurrence
Central Heating Commissioning and Inspection Report
Domestic Energy Efficiency Checklist
Commercial Heating Installations Energy Efficiency Checklist
Estimate of Works Summary
Report of a Dangerous Gas Fitting
2 Part Invoices
Commercial Catering Inspections Record
Fumes Investigation Report
Ventilation Report
Electrical Safety Warning and Advice Notice
Landlords Gas Safety Record
Flue Termination Investigation & Report Form
Personal Protective Equipment Register
Gas Safety Inspection Report - Domestic
Gas Safety Inspection Report - Non Domestic
Central Heating Cleaning Record
Risk Assessment Record
Domestic Periodic Inspection Record
Service & Maintenance Checklist
Chimney, Fireplace and Hearth Commissioning Record
Leisure Industry Gas Safety Record
Bathroom Quality Checklist
Essential Forms Reordering Form
At this point I gave up looking - pretty soon now I can see a form appearing to record what forms you have actually completed during each working day!
Add to that the amount of ink that is required to complete each form, and the trees that have had to be turned into paper, and it starts to look like an environmentalist's nightmare.
Just think of the impact on the planet if 100,000 installers are just completing on average 2 forms a day (and those forms are 2 parts). if we use an approximate weight of a single sheet of paper as 4 grams, that makes a total weight for paper for any one day as:
100,000 (installers) x 2 (forms) x 2 (parts) x 4 (grams) = 1,600,000 grams which is 1.6 metric tonnes of paper per day or 584 tonnes per year!
This equates to approximately 83 Double Decker Buses or 679,069 bottles of Champagne.
Of course, I accept that in certain cases it is essential to record information, and ensure that there is a documented report available to refer to at a later date - and that all the stakeholders have their own copy. But surely in this day and age, we must be able to reduce the number of forms and the amount of time wasted completing and duplicating information on each form?
Within our own publications we have included what we believe to be essential forms and reports; their purpose is to demonstrate the type of information that should be recorded.
We have however, received many requests over the years to reproduce these forms and reports for general use. Up until now it was not an area that we had the time to explore, but with new technology and the new format of our publications perhaps we should consider providing these forms in our member's area.
If we do go down this route our aim would be to provide simple forms and recording mechanisms that allow installers to record essential information and utilise wherever possible the unique electronic format that we have developed. Recognising that there will probably always be a need in the immediate future we probably would have paper copies available - but we would do our best to cut down on the figure of 584 tonnes of gas installer generated paper used in a year!
But it is not really down to us to decide - there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much money that can be used for new development projects. We will leave this one to our members to vote on in one of our polls on the home page and let them decided if we should venture down this route.
Keywords: gas installer forms essential forms vipergas membership
