Electrical Installation Condition Reports in Heath — largely interwar semis, many of them extended, a good number of them let.
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.
Heath is mostly 1930s semi-detached housing, with the additions you would expect of houses that have been lived in for ninety years. The original installations are long gone; what the report is usually looking at is a rewire from somewhere between the seventies and the nineties, plus everything added since.
Rear extensions are the recurring theme. An extension brings sockets, lighting and often a new circuit, and the quality of what was done varies enormously depending on who did it and when. Where an extension was built and the electrics handled as an afterthought, that is typically where the findings are.
Being close to the hospital, a fair proportion of houses here are let to working professionals rather than students, which tends to mean longer tenancies and a five-year cycle that runs on the date rather than on turnover. That makes it easier to plan, and easier to forget.
One thing changing fast on streets like these is EV charging. A 1930s semi with an original service head and a modest main fuse was not built with a 7kW load in mind, and whether a charge point can go in without further work depends on the supply as much as on the driveway. An EICR does not answer that question on its own, but it tells you the condition of everything a charger would be added to.
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.
Age alone does not make an installation unsatisfactory. An eighties rewire in good condition can pass perfectly well, though it will often pick up C3 recommendations where standards have moved on since. The testing tells you the condition; the date only tells you what to expect.
Yes. The report covers the whole installation as it now stands, extensions included. If a circuit was added for an extension it gets inspected and tested with the rest.
No, but someone needs to let us in and the power will be off for parts of it. Access to the consumer unit and to every room matters more than your being present throughout.
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 Heath.
EICR Cardiff · EICR Roath · EICR Caerphilly · EICR Pontypridd · EICR Barry · EICR Newport · EICR Lisvane · EICR Llanishen · EICR Whitchurch