Intelligas, the gas safety and control systems specialist, already has systems that can handle the changes to BS6173, the new standard on gas installations in catering, introduced this August.

"We designed our systems to be ready for the future," says Andrew Dickenson, Managing Director of Intelligas. “With BS6173:2009, a little bit of the future is here now and it shows we have taken the right approach."

BS6173 covers “Specification for installation and maintenance of gas-fired catering appliances for use in all types of catering establishments (2nd and 3rd family gases).” The latest version, BS6173:2009 replaces a version published in 2001.

Intelligas already has a multi-services controller, MSC101, that can monitor CO2 levels and change, for example, ventilation fan speed to make sure they don’t go too high. Designed to cope with rules covering schools, it shows how Intelligas has already addressed concern over CO2.

“We’ve built flexibility into our systems and the latest rule changes show that it’s the right approach,” he says. “While the rest of the industry is selling old technology, we’ve built our business on supplying equipment that makes the best use of modern, solid state electronics to provide reliable, flexible answers to gas safety.”

“That flexibility means we can adapt current systems to the new standard,” he says. “You’ll get a properly designed system, not something put together from what an on-site engineer has to hand."

Andrew Dickenson believes that this kind of flexibility is vital. "This won’t be the last version of the standard," he says. "The one thing you can be sure of is change. Anybody in business knows that you've got to be able to deal with change in every aspect of your business. That applies to gas safety systems just as much as anything else."

"We don't know what's going to be in the next version of the standard. We don't know when it will come out. We don't know what other rule changes there are going to be. But what we can be sure of is that there will be new rules," he says. "It’s only common sense to put in systems that are designed from the start to adapt. That makes Intelligas the only common sense choice."