Standards and Accreditations

In order to supply excellent quality service to our customers, EffecTech now holds five accreditations, awarded by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), listed below.

You can also access all of EffecTech’s UKAS accreditation certificates and scopes in our UKAS wallet.

What is a standard?

The International Standards Organisation website describes an International Standard as a document that “provides rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or for their results, aimed at achieving the optimum degree of order in a given context. It can take many forms. Apart from product standards, other examples include: test methods, codes of practice, guideline standards and management systems standards.”

• To find out more about ISO see here or their website: iso.org
• To find out more about UKAS, see here or their website: ukas.com
• To find out more about BSI, see here or their website: bsigroup.com

Why are standards and accreditations important?

Organisations that have successfully achieved accreditation to ISO standards have demonstrated their competence through an independent third-party review by their accreditation body. This gives customers confidence that their suppliers are using the latest approved methods and that they deliver what they claim to.

Standardisation helps companies:

• manage complexity
• enhance customer satisfaction
• reduce trade barriers
• assess and compare new and existing technologies against their own requirements as well as their regulatory and contractual obligations
• identify high-quality suppliers easily

Types of ISO Standards

UKAS provides accreditation to conformity assessment bodies that carry out conformity assessment in accordance with standards. Examples of the accreditations that UKAS can award include accreditation as a calibration laboratory (ISO 17025:2005), testing laboratory (ISO17025:2005), inspection body (ISO 17020:2012) and proficiency testing provider (ISO 17043:2010).

Under their accreditations conformity assessment bodies will carry out tasks/activities in accordance with applicable national, European and international standard(s), regulations and guides. For example under EffecTech’s accreditation as a calibration laboratory we can perform the calibration of gas analysers used for natural gas analysis in accordance with ISO 10723:2012.

Standards in gas quality measurement

• ISO 6142 – Gas analysis – Preparation of calibration gas mixtures – Part 1: Gravimetric method for Class I mixtures
• ISO 6143 – Gas analysis – Comparison methods for determining and checking the composition of calibration gas mixtures
• ISO 6974 – Natural gas – Determination of composition and associated uncertainty by gas chromatography
  • Part 1: General guidelines and calculation of composition
  • Part 2: Uncertainty calculations
  • Part 3: Precision and bias
  • Part 5: Isothermal method for nitrogen, carbon dioxide, C₁ to C₅ hydrocarbons and C₆+ hydrocarbons
• ISO 23874 – Natural gas – Gas chromatographic requirements for hydrocarbon dewpoint calculation
• ISO 10723 – Natural gas – Performance evaluation for analytical systems
• ISO 12963 – Gas analysis – Comparison methods for the determination of the composition of gas mixtures based on one- and two-point calibration
• ISO 10715 – Natural gas – Sampling guidelines
• BS EN 1776 – Gas infrastructure – Gas measuring systems – Functional requirements

These standards, which currently underpin the use of gas chromatography for gas quality measurement form the basis of many commercial contracts.