Electrical Installation Condition Reports in Caerphilly, Bedwas, Llanbradach and the villages around them.
An Electrical Installation Condition Report is a periodic inspection of an installation that already exists. It is not a certificate for new work — that is a different document — and it does not make anything safe on its own. What it does is tell you, circuit by circuit, the condition of the wiring in the property and what if anything needs attention.
Findings are coded. C1 means danger present, C2 means potentially dangerous, and FI means further investigation is required. Any of those three make the report unsatisfactory. C3 is an improvement recommendation — it does not make a report unsatisfactory, and a perfectly sound installation can carry several.
If you are letting a property in Wales, an EICR is the report you need on a recurring cycle. The rules on what needs inspecting, certifying and notifying are genuinely different here from England, and most advice online is written for England — we set out the Welsh position in what electrical work needs signing off in Wales.
The housing around Caerphilly is a broader mix than central Cardiff — a lot of post-war and ex-local-authority housing, estates built through the sixties and seventies, and older stone cottages towards the edges of the borough. The wiring tends to date from whichever of those eras the house belongs to, with one partial update somewhere along the way.
Installations put in during the sixties and seventies are the ones now reaching the end of a sensible life. Older PVC cable does not fail dramatically; it stiffens and the insulation gives up gradually, which is exactly what insulation resistance testing is for. That is the kind of thing a report picks up before it becomes a fault.
The other Caerphilly feature is outbuildings. Detached garages, workshops and sheds here are frequently supplied by something added informally years ago. That matters more in Wales than it would across the border: outdoor work is notifiable here, and a supply run out to a garage should have paperwork behind it.
Further out towards the edges of the borough, some properties are not on the same earthing arrangement as a typical street in the town. Where the supply is a TT arrangement, with the property relying on its own earth electrode rather than one provided by the network, the report looks at things a standard urban installation never raises. It is worth knowing which you have before anyone quotes for work.
An inspection is not someone glancing at the fuse box. It is a physical inspection of the installation followed by a set of electrical tests, and the tests are the part that takes the time, because they are done circuit by circuit rather than all at once.
We need access to the consumer unit, to the meter and cut-out where the supply comes in, and to every room — including the loft if circuits run through it. The power goes off for parts of the day, usually in stages rather than all at once, so if anyone is working from home or there is a freezer that matters, tell us at the start and we will plan around it.
What you get at the end is the report itself plus the schedule of circuit details and test results that sits behind it. Those results are the evidence; a report without them is not worth much. If anything coded C1 is found we will make it safe before we leave, because leaving a known danger in place is not an option regardless of what you decide to do about the rest.
If remedial work is needed you are under no obligation to have us do it. We would rather quote for it and be compared than have the inspection double as a sales visit.
Yes — they share the CF83 postcode district with Caerphilly and we treat them as the same patch.
It should be. An outbuilding supply is part of the installation and gets inspected and tested with everything else. It is also one of the more common places to find something that was never properly done.
Yes, and this is where English advice misleads people. Wales kept outdoor work and kitchens on the notifiable list when England removed them in 2013. There is a fuller explanation on our page about what needs signing off in Wales.
If the report turns up work that needs doing, we can quote for it — but an EICR and the remedial work are separate decisions and you are under no obligation to have us do both. Related services: consumer unit upgrades, rewiring, EV charge point installation and emergency call-outs. You can also see everything we cover in Caerphilly.
EICR Cardiff · EICR Roath · EICR Pontypridd · EICR Barry · EICR Newport · EICR Heath · EICR Lisvane · EICR Llanishen · EICR Whitchurch