Whilst that is all ('qualitatively') true, I have to say that, in terms of my personal experience, I have lived with electrical/electronic equipment for more decades than I care to remember (the last 35years of which have been in an area where a high proportion of distribution is 'overhead') without ever (that I can recall) having suffered the failure of anything electrical/electronic in temporal association with electric storms in the vicinity. Maybe I've just been lucky but, for me, the 'risk' has clearly been minimal.
Very much YMMV
With a previous work hat on, I regularly went to our MDs house to replace equipment. In that case, overhead electric supply, overhead phone from a completely different direction - in effect, it was like having the house in the middle of along wire antenna laid out to pick up such surges.
However, as far as ai recall, it was
ONLY things like fax machines, cordless phone bases, computer modems - i.e. things connected to both power and phone - that were affected, something I've seen elsewhere as well. As far as surges on either the mains or the phone line, they are generally common mode - so equipment connected only to one or the other generally isn't affected. But when you introduce a ground referenced "other" circuit then you introduce the scope to turn the common mode surge on one circuit into a differential mode surge between that and the other circuit.
I vaguely recall having lost a modem myself from this.
The second worst I've seen was going back further still when a customer came back from working in Madagascar with a seriously I'll set of equipment. His laptop had been connected to the phone line via internal modem, on the modem board the top of a chip had been blown off and there was evidence of it arcing across to the main board. His printer was also connected, and its power brick had literally blown the case apart. They have some serious thunderstorms out there
It was a fair old repair bill - and he was a bit miffed that none of the "cheap stuff" like table lamps or ordinary phones was affected at all. Obviously that's non-UK and a bit extreme, but indicates what can happen.
The very worst was at the same job as in the first anecdote - except it was at the factory & offices before I worked for them (I was doing IT support as a contractor at the time). At my office a few miles away it had almost turned back to night, the rain was like nothing I've seen before or since, lightning going ten to the dozen. Then the client rang to say there'd been a big flash and bang, the computers had stopped working, and there was a burning smell coming from the back room (where the server was). Again, that wasn't the surge per-se, but the differential mode caused by the high localised currents induced by (my best guess, based on description, a ground strike in the field outside). Basically, the further apart two devices were (all serial links back then) the worse the damage. Got the server back up with just one of the four 16 port cards working, replaced a lot of serial port cards in PCs, had the main boards in a load of Macs replaced, and got to be fairly handy at whipping the back off the Wyse 60 terminals and replacing the 1488 and 1489 chips (the sacrificial RS232 converters that saved the mainboard in most of the terminals), the few where it was more serious got stacked on a pallet and sent off for repair.
BUT, adding an SPD to the CU will do absolutely nothing whatsoever to help with the issues I've described above - well very little anyway. It will only help if you also route the phone line via the CU location and pass it through a surge protector connected very stoutly with a very short wire to the CU earth bar, or better still the earth terminal of the mains SPD. Ditto for aerial cables and anything else coming in from outside the protected zone. Since BS7671 doesn't even recommend any of this, the requirement for an SPD sounds a bit like someone on the committee seeing an opportunity to sell more hardware.
In the factory/office one, no phone lines involved - and even within one building, there was sufficient earth potential difference across the building to blow the serial driver chips. Again, SPDs in the distribution boards would not have done any good.
However, the worry these days is that there is so much more electronics in a typical home, and it's built to much lower standards. But I personally wouldn't bother too much.
On the other hand, if a second EICR is done, why should anyone (tenant or LA) believe a second one which said that no urgent remedial work was required, rather than the first one which said that there was 'potential danger' such that 'urgent remedial action was required'?
Like an MoT - it's the most recent inspection of the installation. Unless you have genuine grounds to believe it was not done correctly then that should be the one that applies. Otherwise, you could start arguing as to how long apart EICRs need to be before that is a question - after all, why trust the one done today with no faults vs the one done 5 years ago with a list of them ?
Technically the T&E span is incorrect, yes I know there are thousands of similar installations which have been trouble free for decades, but that doesn't change the fact it's non compliant now.
What's it non-compliant with ?
I'm aware that PVC degrades when exposed to UV, and I've seen recommendations to paint over the cables, but walk round any housing estate and you'll see T&E exposed to the weather on many houses. If it's not showing signs of having gone brittle yet, I'd say not a serious problem.
Reading through again, am I right in assuming that if I remedy all the faults, which I am doing, I won't need to have the property tested again when I do get a tenant ?
Correct
I was assuming it's like an MOT. Once you get the faults fixed you must have it tested again to get the Certificate ?
No, you just need to have fixed any faults.
The regs don't say much about how you document that - after all, a fault could be a broken light switch that you can replace yourself. So really it's just a case of having documentary evidence of them having been attended to.
However, for some they might prefer to have a "clean sheet" to give to a tenant. Some tenants (thankfully only a small minority - in 20+ years I've only ever had one) can be devious sods who will look for any little technicality to try and wriggle out of paying the rent or otherwise profiting from you. Giving them a copy of an EICR with a load of faults, and a statement that they've all been fixed, might give the unscrupulous scope for trying to claim that they haven't been fixed and effectively extorting money.
