Electrical Installation Condition Reports in Pontypridd — valley terraces, student lets, and installations that have seen a few decades.
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.
Pontypridd housing is dominated by stone-built valley terraces, often on steep ground, frequently with solid walls and no cavity. They are solid houses, but the construction has a bearing on the electrics in a way that brick-and-cavity housing does not.
Solid walls hold moisture, and moisture affects insulation resistance readings. A circuit that reads low is not automatically a faulty circuit — it can be a cable that has spent years chased into a wall that never quite dries out. The point of testing rather than guessing is that it distinguishes the two, and a report that just says unsatisfactory without identifying which is not much use to anyone.
The other local factor is letting. With the university nearby a good share of the housing here is rented, which brings the five-yearly cycle and the change-of-occupancy trigger with it. Long runs out to rear outbuildings, common on these plots where the ground drops away behind the house, are worth having looked at at the same time.
The terrain has practical consequences too. On these plots the meter and cut-out are often in an external box on a wall that drops straight to the pavement, or reached through a back lane rather than the front of the house. Access is worth sorting out before the appointment — an inspection that cannot reach the origin of the installation cannot be completed.
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.
Not necessarily. In solid-walled valley housing a low reading is quite often moisture in the fabric rather than failed cable. It needs investigating to tell which, and that is what an FI code on a report is for — further investigation, not a verdict.
At least every five years — that is the duty in Wales, and you also have to give each contract-holder a copy of the report. Renewing at a change of occupancy on top of that is good practice rather than law, but with student lets turning over annually it is how most landlords here keep on top of it.
We cover Pontypridd and the surrounding valleys. Give us the postcode and we will tell you straight away whether it is a journey we make.
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 Pontypridd.
EICR Cardiff · EICR Roath · EICR Caerphilly · EICR Barry · EICR Newport · EICR Heath · EICR Lisvane · EICR Llanishen · EICR Whitchurch