The biggest CRN cost might surprise you. Marketing and operation delays end up costing much more than CRN application and regulator costs. Regulators’ bills aren’t the biggest thing. The regulator will charge as little as about $150CAD or much, much more. Poorly prepared applications for CRN registration will be either rejected, or subjected to a very lengthy iterative review, or both.

Responsibility for registration and application quality rests with the applicant.

Well prepared, professional quality CRN applications will often take a regulator about two to three hours to review on average and this equates to regulator fees of about $500CAD or so or less. But they have many, many applications to review and it might well take a few weeks for an application to reach the top of their pile unless extra expediting fees are paid. Costs are legislated, and registrar’s rates are published (see links here), but regulators’ time can be charged on a half hourly rate if an application is very complex or large. Larger or more calculation intense applications, like a heat exchanger or firetube boiler, will take the regulator a little longer to review but if everything is in order, only a slightly larger fee can be expected for all but the most complex or large applications.

Regulators are NOT responsible for your design.

Poorly prepared CRN applications, that consist basically of a pile of unorganized and unreferenced documents, non-compliant designs, catalogues, drawings, etc., used to be entertained by regulators while the applicant provided corrections. But sorting through such an application would take a regulator longer to evaluate and, as a result, refusals are now a real option. Applicants that rely on the regulator to check their application, to perform the applicant’s quality control, i.e. to do the applicant’s work, are more likely to get a shocking surprise – a bill and no registration! Poor quality applications would result in wasted application and evaluation fees, sometimes higher costs, registration applications that are rejected, and poor relationships with regulators.

Worse yet if a design is mistakenly registered by a regulator, then reactively correcting a mistake once discovered or revealed can obviously be colossally more expensive in terms of reputation than what a proper design application preparation would have been in the first place. Responsibility for registration rests with the owner (end user, seller, distributor, manufacturer, designer, applicant etc.), and recalling or replacing a design that is already distributed and in use can be very expensive. Proper review and checking before an application for CRN registration is submitted should be welcomed, not criticized.

Optimize registration costs by minimizing CRN application delays and mistakes.

Before an application for registration is submitted, ensure that your registration application contains the required information, that the information it contains is correct, that it is well organized with interconnected consistent documents, and that the design meets or exceeds all required regulations, code and standard requirements.