What Is a CF3R Certificate of Verification?

The CF3R is the Certificate of Verification — completed by an independent third-party rater who tests the finished work on site and reports the result to the ECC registry as a pass or a fail.

What it is for

Some Energy Code measures cannot be certified on paper. Whether a duct system actually leaks below a threshold, or whether insulation was genuinely installed to the standard claimed, can only be established by measuring it in the finished building. The CF3R records those measurements, tests and field-verification results.

It is completed by a rater who is independent of the installer, which is the point of it. The installer declares what was installed on the CF2R; the rater verifies it.

Pass or fail, reported to the registry

The result goes to the ECC registry as a pass or a fail, and a fail is not a paperwork formality. It has to be corrected and re-verified before the project can rely on the measure. Where a design's compliance depends on a verified measure, a failed test means the building does not comply until the problem is fixed.

Registration

Prescriptive CF1R, CF2R and CF3R forms for projects with ECC-verified measures are completed through an ECC provider's data registry rather than as loose documents, which is what ties the three stages together under one registration number.

How to avoid it becoming a problem

Two things. Identify at design stage whether any measure will need verification, because that is a scheduling commitment at the end of the build, not a document. And consider whether the design needs those measures at all — a ductless system, for instance, removes duct testing from the job entirely. Choosing a compliance route that avoids verification is a legitimate design decision, and it is much easier to take before construction than during it.