MCS Accreditation

[EasyMCSLtd]

APOLOGIES MCS . You are of course correct , it is 3000 KW , we have a system running with flows and Kw calculations displayed , I missed a zero off DOH !!! So I can actually confirm it is 3000 so £5100 over 20 years .
Now then ......... It is worth serious consideration .
Once again I appologise for my figures , I may well be in touch MCS
Would I be able to claim on my own installation ?

Hi Toddyplumb,

Just to clarify the p/kwh you are using is based on commercial and residential is most likely to be 100% higher so around 18p/kwh which would give you £10,800 over 20 years + £2000 of savings on hot water production?

Just worth considering.

 

[EasyMCSLtd]

Hi dontknowitall,

I think I may have miscommunicated the costs. Upfront cost for you total to achieve MCS Certification including our time designing your quality management system and getting you to MCS Standards £1100-£1200 then your ongoing cost is £400 for each years audit and approx £150 to be a member of REAL.

That is it so say £1200 then £550 a year. Pleas bear in mind if you are going into a new technology you will need to go on a training course for it (again one off payment only)

Those are the costs involved.

If you have a look at the DECC website they are showing commercial users will see a 12% return and it is widely expected that domestic will see higher, this is on top of high savings off very high oil bills.

 

[unguided1]

Hi dontknowitall,

I think I may have miscommunicated the costs. Upfront cost for you total to achieve MCS Certification including our time designing your quality management system and getting you to MCS Standards £1100-£1200 then your ongoing cost is £400 for each years audit and approx £150 to be a member of REAL.

That is it so say £1200 then £550 a year. Pleas bear in mind if you are going into a new technology you will need to go on a training course for it (again one off payment only)

Those are the costs involved.

If you have a look at the DECC website they are showing commercial users will see a 12% return and it is widely expected that domestic will see higher, this is on top of high savings off very high oil bills.

way too expensive, you only have to look in some of the threads on this forum to realise that many of the one man bands are struggling just on gas work alone. The sort of averidge customers that we are all used to dealing with do not have the sort of money to buy this sort of kit, At this moment it appears to be the well off living in the country with detached houses and these people tend to use the larger companies rather than one man bands ( before you all start I know there are exceptions )

When some of the older men on this forum were trained to install heating systems it covered Gas, Oil and Solid fuel central heating systems, Over the last twenty years we have have been forced to become more elitist to the point that we have to pay different bodies to work on systems that we were trained on, now there are new technologies coming in and the whole industry is being splintered even further. Its High time that this stopped A heating engineer is a heating engineer and as I see it there should be just one body regulating the industry and it shouldnt just cover the unit that is creating the heat but also encompass the whole system to a regular standard.

Just out of interest why are my qualifications that I gained as a young man so worthless, Why has the industry become so fractured

 

[moogwai]

been following this thread with interest and i'm afraid i have to agree with the lads on this forum that its far too expensive to get to mcs accredited on the off chance that someone has the spare £7000 upgrading their heating installation.....and even dangling the carrot of "you could earn £10,000 back over 20 years if you have this install" would not sway the majority of the public who's boiler has just broken down and they need a quick "as cheap as possible" fix. In fact i think the majority of people in birmingham would laugh in my face if i gave them a quote of 7 grandish. In this current climate it is just not possible.....people just have not got a spare 7 grand floating around to spend.....petrol and diesel will be costing that much a litre soon with the way the government like to rob all of our money

 

[PlumbBobBob]

totally agree moogwai and also to benefit from these new systems to the fullest extent they have to stay put for the duration and not move! i know some people stay in the same home for life or near as dammit, but other people like to move often. the fees being spoken of are certainly out of my reach for the foreseeable future. hopefully they will come down when accreditation becomes more widespread but somehow i doubt it very much!

 

[EasyMCSLtd]

HI Guys,

You make some valid points, although accreditation costs are at the lowest they are realisticly going to get to, the cost of equipment has a long way to go. The idea is now that the Feed In Tariffs and The Renewable Heat Incentive will drive down equipment prices and mean that you would be looking at comparable costs to boiler replacements as more and more units get installed. With fuel prices on the Up the aim is that consumers will start questioning replacing with a boiler once the technologies are more affordable. If you look at Solar PV since the introduction of the FITTS prices have started to tumble so it wont be long before the heating side follows.

 

[unguided1]

HI Guys,

You make some valid points, although accreditation costs are at the lowest they are realisticly going to get to, the cost of equipment has a long way to go. The idea is now that the Feed In Tariffs and The Renewable Heat Incentive will drive down equipment prices and mean that you would be looking at comparable costs to boiler replacements as more and more units get installed. With fuel prices on the Up the aim is that consumers will start questioning replacing with a boiler once the technologies are more affordable. If you look at Solar PV since the introduction of the FITTS prices have started to tumble so it wont be long before the heating side follows.

As I have stated before all well and good for the big companies but no use for one man bands, Also if its any help to one man bands wanting to get MCS accredited Have a chat with companies that have already gone through the tedious rigmarol of getting MCS accredited and ask how they got their paperwork, you may find that is cheaper than companies offering to do it for you!!!

 

[EasyMCSLtd]

As I have stated before all well and good for the big companies but no use for one man bands, Also if its any help to one man bands wanting to get MCS accredited Have a chat with companies that have already gone through the tedious rigmarol of getting MCS accredited and ask how they got their paperwork, you may find that is cheaper than companies offering to do it for you!!!

Hi Guys,

It is fine to speak to companies already with MCS, please be aware though, MCS Inspecting bodies are coming down hard on people who try and use systems adopted by existing MCS organisations as it should be bespoke to how you operate. Also it isn't very often that an existing MCS company will encourage a competitor to enter the market.

 

[markfxy]

Hi Guys,

It is fine to speak to companies already with MCS, please be aware though, MCS Inspecting bodies are coming down hard on people who try and use systems adopted by existing MCS organisations as it should be bespoke to how you operate. Also it isn't very often that an existing MCS company will encourage a competitor to enter the market.

surely most companies operate in much the same way therefore what works for one will work for all. the paper trail is much the same as bsi 9001 quality control if you use that system you shouldn't have any problems with mcs.

The thing that pi***s me off is you dont need any plumbing qualifications to be registered as an installer for any renewables so how can mcs be a guarantee of a quality installation when the installer might be good at paperwork but not have a clue about installation.

 

[dontknowitall]

surely most companies operate in much the same way therefore what works for one will work for all. the paper trail is much the same as bsi 9001 quality control if you use that system you shouldn't have any problems with mcs.

Must admit I'd not thought about that.

The thing that pi***s me off is you dont need any plumbing qualifications to be registered as an installer for any renewables so how can mcs be a guarantee of a quality installation when the installer might be good at paperwork but not have a clue about installation.

I think this is where much of my confusion over the MCS has been until I read this. I'd assumed that the QMS was a general view of the renewables industry and how each of the products worked and how they could work together and that you had to do this course before you launched into one of the specific areas. (This scheme applies to new OFTEC technicians who've no oil experience.)

I'd no idea it was simply about administration.

 

[SimonG]

Hi Guys,

It is fine to speak to companies already with MCS, please be aware though, MCS Inspecting bodies are coming down hard on people who try and use systems adopted by existing MCS organisations as it should be bespoke to how you operate. Also it isn't very often that an existing MCS company will encourage a competitor to enter the market.

Don't understand your comments re people adopting systems. Surely the services you would offer would come from your own template that you are selling to companies/individuals after fine tuning. Surely the inspecting bodies would also like some sort of commonality to make their jobs easier.
If I remember back to the company I served my time with, when they went down the Quality Assured route it was basically a set of 15 files for each contract. The auditors wanted commanality.

 

[unguided1]

The thing that pi***s me off is you dont need any plumbing qualifications to be registered as an installer for any renewables so how can mcs be a guarantee of a quality installation when the installer might be good at paperwork but not have a clue about installation.

Despite what anyone else says denying it, this is infact completley true

 

[dontknowitall]

Hi dontknowitall,

I think I may have miscommunicated the costs. Upfront cost for you total to achieve MCS Certification including our time designing your quality management system and getting you to MCS Standards £1100-£1200 then your ongoing cost is £400 for each years audit and approx £150 to be a member of REAL.

That is it so say £1200 then £550 a year. Pleas bear in mind if you are going into a new technology you will need to go on a training course for it (again one off payment only)

Those are the costs involved.

If you have a look at the DECC website they are showing commercial users will see a 12% return and it is widely expected that domestic will see higher, this is on top of high savings off very high oil bills.

Thank you for that info. I'm still a little confused though!

So the cost, as far as I can make out, is £1,100 set up of the Quality Management System.

The course for solar thermal is £300.
The course for photovoltaic is £300.

There is a £400 annual registration cost.

So the first year will cost me £2,100 and each subsequent year will cost me £400.

Are these the ONLY costs? Does this price mean that I can LEGALLY sign off work and my customers can benefit from the feed-in-tarriff or whatever government grant systems there are? Do I have to re-train every so many years?

It seems now that the setup costs are £1,200 and ongoing £550 instead of me thinking it was £1,100 and £400. This, though doesn't include the course costs of £300 each (which is where my £2,100 came from). REAL's subscription for 1-6 employees is £220. So total for the first year is now £1,200 plus £400, plus £220, plus £300, plus £300 equalling £2,420. Hopefully that's including VAT because if not then we're talking about £2,904.

The last part of my quote was asking if there are other costs. There's Gassafe for gas, OFTEC for oil and HETAS for solid fuel. These bodies have inspectors to ensure the standards are maintained by the installers.

Who is the renewables industry "policed" by? Is it the local council or someone else? Is it REAL?

Looking on REAL's website there's an audit form of 10 pages of questions. One question (picked at random) is:

Is a record systematically kept of time spent in a consumer’s premises? If this exceeds two hours, is the reason for this recorded and correlated with the record of any requests to cancel the contract?


Is this the same as the MCS QMS? And if so, do we have to do both?

Once again, I'm sorry, but I'm becoming really confused now!!

Finally, are these the ONLY costs? Does this price mean that I can LEGALLY sign off work and my customers can benefit from the feed-in-tarriff or whatever government grant systems there are? Do I have to re-train every so many years?

 

[unguided1]

Thank you for that info. I'm still a little confused though!




It seems now that the setup costs are £1,200 and ongoing £550 instead of me thinking it was £1,100 and £400. This, though doesn't include the course costs of £300 each (which is where my £2,100 came from). REAL's subscription for 1-6 employees is £220. So total for the first year is now £1,200 plus £400, plus £220, plus £300, plus £300 equalling £2,420. Hopefully that's including VAT because if not then we're talking about £2,904.

The last part of my quote was asking if there are other costs. There's Gassafe for gas, OFTEC for oil and HETAS for solid fuel. These bodies have inspectors to ensure the standards are maintained by the installers.

Who is the renewables industry "policed" by? Is it the local council or someone else? Is it REAL?

Looking on REAL's website there's an audit form of 10 pages of questions. One question (picked at random) is:

Is a record systematically kept of time spent in a consumer’s premises? If this exceeds two hours, is the reason for this recorded and correlated with the record of any requests to cancel the contract?


Is this the same as the MCS QMS? And if so, do we have to do both?

Once again, I'm sorry, but I'm becoming really confused now!!

Finally, are these the ONLY costs? Does this price mean that I can LEGALLY sign off work and my customers can benefit from the feed-in-tarriff or whatever government grant systems there are? Do I have to re-train every so many years?

The truth from me is Im damned if i know, but as a self employed pipe fitter!!! I will not be going MCS accredited accredited until there is some sort of grant or proper tax break for sole traders (not that I pay much tax anyway being self unemployed)

 

[unguided1]

Hi Guys,

It is fine to speak to companies already with MCS, please be aware though, MCS Inspecting bodies are coming down hard on people who try and use systems adopted by existing MCS organisations as it should be bespoke to how you operate. Also it isn't very often that an existing MCS company will encourage a competitor to enter the market.

If it should be bespoke to how I operate, does that mean that I can still use my current fileing system of writing on the back of *** packets and leaving them on the dashboard of me van