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I have recently started back repairing appliances.
In the past I only worked on electric appliances.
I was wondering what is involved, courses required, costs involved to become a Gas engineer.
From my local college website it seems that you can only get a place on a course if you work for a Corgi registered company. Is this the case with all colleges?
From reading the posts on this website there seems to be a lot of opinion that Corgi registration/training is very expensive and not worth the hassle. Is this the case?
Thanks for any replysRe: Corgi registration.
Walnut, if you use the search function at the top of the forums and search for “Corgi” without the quotes, you should find all the info you need 😀
It’s a bit of a minefield to be honest 😕
Dave.
Re: Corgi registration.
If you were thinking in terms of doing gas cookers, fires, tumble driers etc I would have thought it more trouble than it’s worth. The money is in central heating boiler servicing and repairs. A lot of the older guys are struggling with the amount of electronics in modern boilers so there are openings for anyone good at diagnostics.
Re: Corgi registration.
Been reading the threads about ‘corgi’ for the past thew weeks, learnt a lot but I couldn’t find the answers to the above questions, your right it is a minefield.
I come from an electronics background so diagnostics is right up my street.
I think I’ll ring up Corgi and ask them how your supposed to become qualified if work for yourself.
Re: Corgi registration.
CORGI and the HSE, in their ultimate wisdom, have made life a tad, “difficult”, shall we say when it comes to getting qualified these days. Not only do you have to do the old bit ACS now, if you have no relevent experience you have to get it which, in effect, requires that you ride shotgun with someone to get the experience. It is a minefield already and a very expensive one to traverse.
Is it ultimately worth it? Well the jury’s out on that for now.
With experience I reckon that it cost about £6K to put two engineers through ACS including the downtime (but not the hassles) so it’s not cheap to do this. For me it is worth it as we do a lot of installation work, were it not for that I doubt I would have bothered in all honesty as when you look at the figures they just do not add up. The cost of attaining CORGI certification is way more than the potential gain if you look solely at the jobs it allows you to do.
What it does sometimes get you is the ability to take on a contract that involves gas products when, had you not had CORGI, you may otherwise not have been able to do. It comes down to the application of a little common sense and arithmetic to work out whether or not you can justify the costs.
This is why I would not do the likes of the Candy Group work for only these and problematic products as the rate of pay in relation to the skill level required was far, far too low and I did not invest that money in training just to sell it under cost. And there is the crux of it and often the way we do not look at something, we have a product to sell and that product is service, the better the service, the better skilled that we are and the more knowledgable then the higher the value of our service.
I have said before that a friend of mine who repaired boilers, he was an authorised service agent for Vokera, emmigrated to Spain a year or so ago as he said that he couldn’t make it pay in this country. He was getting paid 20-25{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} better rates than we are and some of those from insurers that we also deal with. So I’m guessing that the boiler repairers are suffering as much as we are and from what I hear, they too are in short supply.
The moral of this long tale is that should you geta CORGI card, do not under any circumstances under estimate its value.
K.
Re: Corgi registration.
Your comments Re. boilers surprise me. In the appliance business we are up against the throw away society. It started off with kettles, irons, toasters etc. and now a lot of people sling the bigger appliances rather than pay someone to repair them. With a gas cooker they can go to Comet or such places, buy a new one and plug it in. With a central heating boiler they can’t just tear that off the wall and nail a new one up so they have to call in the experts.
Yes, but a callout for a boiler being chargeable from Vokera was just under £100 and the most common fault was a PCB failure at £100-200 a pop.
Faced with a £300 repair on a four or five year old boiler what would you do given that you can quite legitimately walk into B&Q and buy a new one for £700 or less? I think it’s the same issues that we have with integrated appliances, whilst there’s less chance that the customer will toss them, it still happens a fair bit.
K.
Re: Corgi registration.
£700 for the boiler and about the same again to have it installed. I would pay the £300 ( I wouldn’t actually, I would have a good go at getting the board repaired).
Re: Corgi registration.
walnut,
try some of the corgi assesment centre’s for quotes on the trainig for gas appliances,etc these incorporate these prior to doing to doing your certification/assesment. worth a look for qoutes, should give you an idea on your outlay.
ask for core safety,pipework, and cookers to start with, dont go in at the deep end doing everyting in one go. get some expierence and confidence 1st . next is gas fires, t/driers, (not great amount out there but worth having) and LPG,
TELL..Re: Corgi registration.
I went to a corgi assessment/registration college for info about becoming registered and according to the assessor, as I had worked on gas products before (all be it many moons ago) If I sent in what experience I had and for how long, I may have been able to do a short course. It did seem to be up to him on wether I did this or not. Just a thought.
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