EICR - Unsatisfactory on new build
- Thread starter asingla
- Start date
Sponsored Links
I obviously don't have anything like as much experience, but I have adequate test kit and certainly the knowledge of how to use it and interpret the results ... so you really can't generalise.
Although I do most of my own electrical work and have the equipment and skills to test it, I find it difficult to keep up-to-date with the latest electrical regulations and practices. My knowledge is 15 years out of date.
The advantage of employing an electrician is that they will have current knowledge of the regulations and available gadgetry. They may know that something which I have been doing for years is no longer best practice or possibly even no longer compliant. Sometimes it pays to employ professionals.
Where a professional recommends something that I am unsure of I ask questions on here as there are several contributors here that I have come to trust.
The advantage of employing an electrician is that they will have current knowledge of the regulations and available gadgetry. They may know that something which I have been doing for years is no longer best practice or possibly even no longer compliant. Sometimes it pays to employ professionals.
Where a professional recommends something that I am unsure of I ask questions on here as there are several contributors here that I have come to trust.
"Practices' (in the sense of skills etc.) have changed very little for decades, 'what is done differently now' being primarily a matter of evolution of additional 'requirements' of the regulations.
As for the regulations, I'm sure you could get up-to-date if you wanted to. Once one is very familiar with one version (e.g. BS767`1:2008, which was about 15 years ago) getting up-to-speed in relation to subsequent changes is pretty easy, given that the 'fundamentals 'virtually never change,but a few extra 'requirements' creep in each time. Personally, I am sure that I am at least as knowledgeable about the 'current regs' as are many electricians.
I would imagine that a high proportion of people who do electrical; DIY work have relatively little(if any) knowledge of the regulations. In fact, the regs are, in concept, far from rocket science. Anyone who understands the underlying electrical principles and wanted to undertake 'safe' electrical work would probably do very much the same as the regulations 'require' - give or take some of the more 'conentious' requirements which exist in the regs!
As above, if you so wished I'm sure that it would not be difficult for you to update your knowledge to be at least as 'current' to that of many an electrician - and, if it's 'safety' that concerns you rather than 'strioct compliance with regs', then something which was consdiered 'safe enough' 15 years ago is no less safe today - although official attitudes to 'degrees of acceptable risk' may have changed.
That's sensible.
Kind Regards, John
Sponsored Links
I'm glad that I am not a lone voice
Agreed, but that often easier said than done - one will often/usually have to do some initial 'gambling' in order to determine whether a particular individual deserves one's trust.
There are certainly some tradesmen' (of both genders!) who have 'earned my trust', but that happened a long time ago, prior to which I presume that they must have been essentially 'unknown quantities'' as dar as I was concerned!
Kind Regards, John
There isn't any issue of 'reliability'. Compact RCBOs might fit into that consumer unit in place of the MCBs on the left side or they might not.
Even if they do, that won't resolve the issue of the incorrect RCD for the socket outlet circuits, and you can't fit RCBOs on the right side without removing the RCD and installing a new busbar, assuming such things are still available for it.
Theoretically a Type A RCD might be available, or perhaps they could all go on the left side, but then there is no space for the surge protection.
However this is all pointless. The majority of the cost of a consumer unit is the devices contained within it. The actual unit is just a plastic or metal box with a few brass terminals and a copper busbar, £50 or so..
In this case a new consumer unit is the obvious solution - metal, with main switch, surge protection and RCBOs, or possibly AFDDs for the socket circuits.
Sounds like a bit of a chancer, frankly. If he's given you a C2 code, he needs to be able to explain why. He probably can't because he wasn't there long enough to make proper observations. Seems to me he's running around doing 5 drive-by EICRs a day and hoping people then call him to fit new consumer units when he gives his ambiguous C2 codings on whatever he feels like. Get a second opinion.
Thanks for your kind words John and I would like to Vice-Versa your second paragraph too.
There are some on here (and the IET forum too) that I`ve formed an opinion of their "goodness". Some are electricians and some are not, some have paper qualifications and some do not, some have served apprenticeships, been to college/university and some have not, some I`ve seen at the Elex show and some not, some I`ve seen on youtube etc and some I`ve not.
You're welcome, but I only 'spoke the truth'. As for your reciprocation, that's also very kind, but perhaps not so relevant, since (whatever I may feel about my own knowledge and capabilities) I wouldn't really expect anyone to 'trust' me as regards doing electrical work
No matter what the nature and duration or training and experience, and no matter what qualifications a person may have, the best that one can tell from such things is what an individual ought to be 'capable of', but that does not necessarily mean much in terms of what they actually 'do' in practice. In many walks of life, I have sometimes come across people with plenty of knowledge and skills to 'do things properly' but who have chosen to 'cut corners' and do things in a shoddy fashion, so as to minimise time and maximise income (and/or to generate the need for 'unnecessary work').
One therefore also needs to know about 'attitudes'. Even given that I have a little relevant technical knowledge, it has taken at least many months of reading what your write for me to formulate my 'opinion' of you, and that's primarily what has led me to write what I did. You are not alone - I feel the same about several (but not all) of the other electricians who participate in this forum. It is, of course, a very self-selected group that we see here - I would not really expect electricians (or 'electricians') whom 'I would not trust' to feel inclined to participate in a forum such as this.
In terms of academic qualifications, I have always thought that there is somewhat of a disconnect between academia and what is generally expected of those with academic qualifications. For example, a person "with a degree" will generally be expected to 'know everything relevant and get everything right', yet their getting of that degree will be the result of their having passed an exam (and/or other means of assessment) for which the 'pass mark' is rarely much above 50%. It's therefore possible that, when they took the exam/whatever they may have got nearly half of their answers 'wrong'!
Kind Regards, John
Haha, even dare I say, with some 4 choice answers it is sure as difficult to guess answers and get a mark below 25% than it is to get some way above 25% by pure randomness.
I would hope and was the passmark in some I took were initially aimed at an expected pass rate of about 70% but once the papers were in to the examining body they were evaluated and sometimes tweaked if the results were thought to be significant.
Personally I would like a pass rate to be around 90% or more to see if someone "knows their onions" and decent candidates would be looking as to how they got 10% wrong unless they decide to argue the principle if they thought the official answer was wrong as applied to the particular question.
Ref cutting corners by people more knowledgeable I knew a joiner heading a small firm and he had a saying about a few tradesmen he wasn`t too keen on by sarcastically saying "Well! He talks a good job" meaning the fellow`s job was not actually as good as he talks it.
I would hope and was the passmark in some I took were initially aimed at an expected pass rate of about 70% but once the papers were in to the examining body they were evaluated and sometimes tweaked if the results were thought to be significant.
Personally I would like a pass rate to be around 90% or more to see if someone "knows their onions" and decent candidates would be looking as to how they got 10% wrong unless they decide to argue the principle if they thought the official answer was wrong as applied to the particular question.
Ref cutting corners by people more knowledgeable I knew a joiner heading a small firm and he had a saying about a few tradesmen he wasn`t too keen on by sarcastically saying "Well! He talks a good job" meaning the fellow`s job was not actually as good as he talks it.
Indeed, and it's quite often worse than that, since it's quite common for one of the answers offered to be one which is 'silly' in the minds of anyone who knows anything at all about the subject. If people guess from the non-silly oprtions, they might well end up with appreciably more than 25%.,
You are, of course, talking about MCQs and, being of the age I am, I was not really thinking of them - the 'written' exams I did - at school, uni and beyond, rarely had pass marks above 50%, and 45% was not uncommon.
I have, however, in the fairly distant past, done work on marking systems for MCQs, which can theoretically get quite sophisticated. For example, some systems will discount questions for which results for individual candidates do not correlate well with overall results (over all questions) for a given candidate - i.e. an attempt to weed out poor (or 'poorly-discriminatory') questions.
Although MCQs are logistically much simpler/cheaper, and at least consistent (across candidates) in how they are marked, I don't think they are all that good as tests of knowledge - since 'prompted recall' is very different (and easier) than 'non-prompted recall'- whereas it is the latter that is needed when people move from exams into the real world of practice. ... and ...
... the relatively few MCQs I've had to do have driven me mad. The more one knows and is able to think, the more difficult does it become to decide what answers are being expected, and I was constantly feeling the need to write 'qualifying comments' on the results sheets
The ones that I really hated (only too common in the fields in question were ones which asked something like "Which of the following are common features seen in XYZ (tick as many as apply)?". It was often the case that all the answers offered were 'credible', so one had to try to decide what the examiners may have regarded as 'common'!Yes, there's quite a lot of it about. However, it's not all 'bad'. Some of those I 'know and trust' have been known to say things like "if I could spend a lot more time on a job I could do it even better ('as properly as I would like to do'), but it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a customer to pay for that extra time".
Kind Regards, John
DIYnot Local
Staff member
If you need to find a tradesperson to get your job done, please try our local search below, or if you are doing it yourself you can find suppliers local to you.
Select the supplier or trade you require, enter your location to begin your search.
Are you a trade or supplier? You can create your listing free at DIYnot Local
Sponsored Links
