Electrical Installation Condition Reports in Roath — mostly Victorian terraces, a lot of them let, and almost all of them altered more than once.
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.
Roath is largely late-Victorian terraced housing, and a high proportion of it is rented. That combination shows up in the report. These houses have generally been rewired at some point, often in the 1970s or 80s, and then added to repeatedly since — a socket in the back bedroom here, a shower there, an outside light for the yard.
The recurring findings are additions rather than the original work: spurs taken off spurs, circuits that have quietly grown past what they were designed for, and lighting wired before earthing at the switch was standard, which matters the moment someone fits a metal fitting. Loft conversions are common round here too, and a converted loft brings a new circuit with it — which in Wales is notifiable work and should have a certificate behind it.
For a let property the practical point is the cycle rather than any one finding. In Wales a landlord must have an inspection carried out at least every five years, and must give the contract-holder a copy of the report. Renewing on a change of occupancy as well is long-standing good practice rather than a legal requirement — but in a street where tenancies turn over annually it is the sensible way to stay ahead of the five-year date.
Where remedial work is needed, the sensible time to do it is the void between tenancies, and in Roath those windows are short and tend to fall in the same few weeks of the year. Booking the inspection early in the summer rather than the week before a new tenancy starts is the difference between doing the work properly and doing it in a rush.
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.
The inspection itself is the same, but licensed HMOs carry additional duties and your licence conditions may set their own intervals and require other checks alongside it. Worth reading the licence rather than assuming the five-year cycle covers everything.
It depends what is fitted. With all-plastic fittings it is usually a C3 recommendation. Put a metal switch plate on the same circuit and it becomes a different conversation. It is one of the most common findings in houses of this age.
That is usually the easiest time to do it, because the power has to go off for parts of the inspection and any remedial work can follow straight on while the house is empty.
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 Roath.
EICR Cardiff · EICR Caerphilly · EICR Pontypridd · EICR Barry · EICR Newport · EICR Heath · EICR Lisvane · EICR Llanishen · EICR Whitchurch