An Electrical Installation Condition Report on a Cardiff property — the inspection a landlord needs every five years, and the one a buyer's solicitor asks for.
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.
Cardiff is not one housing stock, it is several, and the report reads differently depending on which part of the city the property sits in. A Victorian terrace off Albany Road, a 1930s semi in Llandaff and a flat in the Bay were wired in different decades to different standards, and the things that come back coded are not the same in each.
The most common findings across the city are the ones you would expect of a housing stock that has been added to for a long time: lighting circuits with no protective conductor at the switch, sockets spurred off spurs, and consumer units that were adequate when fitted and are not now. None of that means the installation is dangerous. It means the report will say what needs doing and in what order.
Cardiff also has one of the larger private rented sectors in Wales, so a good share of the EICRs we carry out here are for landlords working to the five-yearly cycle rather than for a sale. If you are letting, the date on the last report matters as much as what it said.
If a report does come back unsatisfactory, the codes tell you the order to work in. A C1 needs making safe there and then — we would not leave a property with one outstanding. A C2 needs putting right, but it is a job you can plan and get quoted properly rather than something to panic about. Across a city with this much older housing, unsatisfactory is a common outcome and rarely a dramatic one.
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.
Most two or three bedroom houses are a half day, sometimes a little more where the consumer unit is awkward to get at or the circuits have been extended over the years and need tracing. The power is off for parts of it, which is worth knowing if anyone is working from home.
No. C1, C2 and FI make a report unsatisfactory. A C3 is an improvement recommendation — it is telling you something falls short of the current standard but is not unsafe. A report can be satisfactory and still carry several C3s.
An EICR reports on the condition of what is already there, so it is the right document to ask for before committing. Separately, if work has been done that was notifiable, there should be a building regulations compliance certificate for it — those are two different pieces of paper and one does not replace the other.
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 Cardiff.
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