A licence is not a competence.

Two different things get conflated here constantly, and the difference is where most heat pump disappointment comes from.

What licensing certifies

• Gas technician licensing is provincial, statutory and delegated to a safety authority. It certifies that a person may lawfully work on gas-fired equipment. In Ontario that authority is the provincial technical standards regulator; other provinces have their own.
• Electrical contractor licensing is provincial and governs who may perform and file electrical work. In Ontario, grid-tied work is installed and filed by a licensed Electrical Contractor with a Notification of Work to the electrical authority, against the current edition of the provincial electrical code.

Both are real, both are enforced, and both are about not causing an explosion or an electrocution.

What neither of them certifies

• Load calculation. Whether the heat pump was sized against a real heat loss and gain calculation or against the nameplate of the unit being replaced. Oversizing is the most common reason a correctly installed, correctly licensed heat pump underperforms.
• Commissioning. Whether charge, airflow and controls were set and verified, or whether the unit was switched on and left.
• Control strategy. Whether the changeover and backup logic makes sense in February, which is when the customer finds out.
• Interaction with the envelope. Whether anybody looked at the building before sizing the equipment.

What a competent heat pump retrofit actually requires

1. A heat loss and gain calculation on the building as it is — and note that a mandated Canadian calculation standard now applies in several provinces, with specific software requirements that common residential modelling tools do not satisfy.
2. An electrical capacity check before anything is specified.
3. Equipment selected against the calculation, with a defensible backup strategy.
4. Installation and filing by the appropriately licensed trades.
5. Commissioning with recorded values, handed over to the owner.

Steps one, two, three and five are not covered by any licence. That is the gap, and it sits inside the first scheme CABCEP is developing.

Where the provinces differ

Substantially, and this is not a page to rely on for your jurisdiction. Licence classes, scopes of practice, notification requirements and inspection regimes are all provincial, and the safety authority in your province is the only authority on its own rules. What is consistent across the country is the shape of the problem: safety is licensed, performance is not.

Common questions