EICR has thrown a complete spanner in the works?

This is an opportunity for electricians to print money. It's their 'gold rush' at the moment and they are not letting us down!

I have paid between £80 and £300 for an EICR report. and yes, the price to put right the works varies between electricians. If they smell blood, they will rip you apart. Do some reading and educate yourself with basics. I think NRLA are doing some 'Basic Electricals' course for landlords if anyone wants to take it that far.

These are the unintended consequences of another ill thought out policy of this government. I am all for safety of the properties and tenants, but the rush and deadlines cause their own new 'market' for tradesmen to add pressure for already under-pressure landlords for ever increasing costs.

What would be about the reasonable amount to pay for certificate, with change of consumer unit, smoke alarm and smoke detector wired in? I have just been paying what they asked around £1000

Did I read somewhere that plastic consumer unit is legally ok to have?

Reply to the comment left by aga smart at 17/04/2021 - 07:49
Smoke detectors do not fall within the remit of an EICR. There is a legal requirement that each level/floor of a dwelling has a WORKING smoke detector present. All new build residential properties (from late 1980s) will usually have wired smoke detectors fitted correctly. The alarms do have an expiry date. C3 classification at the most as an advisory if anything picked up by electrician, depending upon their thoroughness. But obviously Safety is paramount.

£250 from my electrician in Gloucester, I found another to do it for £175, still waiting for it to be done

Reply to the comment left by aga smart at 17/04/2021 - 07:50
Provided a consumer unit is safe and complied with regs when it was installed, its legal. I have several plastic ones still.
The eicr is not intended to judge installations based upon the current regs, but to determine if the installation is safe. Only safety issues should cause a fail. Any others which are related to non-complisnce to current regs are advisories, and should not be used to deny a certificate. That may change in the future however.

However its true that you are at the mercy of the electrician unless you are knowledgeable enough to debate what constitutes a safety issue.
I do think most electricians are honest and busy enough that they dont want to generate extra work, but there are going to be exceptions if it seems to be easy money!

Reply to the comment left by JGM at 17/04/2021 - 08:02
Just to confirm Smoke alarms installed since 3 September 2007 must be mains powered, with all battery-powered fire alarms required to be hardwired when they are replaced.

Unfortunately there is no 1 professional body for competence for electricians to register with as there is for gas and this leads to enormous variations in standards and prices. This article is very informative for those who are unsure about what standards are required of Electricians to perform on others properties- https://www.danstheengineer.co.uk/do-you-need-to-be-registered-to-work-as-an-electrician-in-the-uk/
They each seem to have their pet thing to fail a test one eg non sheathing of earth wires inside boxes etc - I had one guy turn up, plug in a testing thing , fail the system, charge me £160 and walked off after 10 mins saying he would work out a price for getting it through - £800 - His report which he wrote was full of erroneous readings which another spark was in shock over- I rang to ask which body he was registered with and he fobbed me of like the cowboy he was. (I check in advance now)
I think Landlords need to come together as a linked force on so many topics as we are being ridden over by all kinds of legislation which we are not being represented on - A professional body where all Landlords pay an annual sub of eg £50 would have been ideal 10 years ago to represent our side, sadly most legislation has already been past and has been very much against the landlords interests- we have been completely walked all over and done nothing about it! I have written to my MP on every single change made in the last 10 years particularly the huge cost of a Licence fee which takes 2 hours to deal with by the Council - in Winchester it has been on average 60% more than the nearest 8 similar cities within 50miles and a colossal 5 times what Oxford were charging !
I am no fan of unions but if we had been properly represented and come together as an industry we might have fought our corner more successfully- the final straw for me is being literally forced to take animals - Please write to your MP to complain about this absolute infringement of our own civil and human rights as owners of the properties esp given we cannot charge any more deposit to cater for the huge costs in sorting out new carpets and repairs following having an animal forced on us. They have completely ignored the timescale for repairs which would mean we cannot follow on immediately with new tenants as organising much of this work could take weeks, weeks of time we will lose rent for .

There are other detailed threads on this forum regarding EICRs and the qualifications needed to carry out test and inspection.
The bottom line would appear to suggest that a skilled electrician qualified to the current addition of the electrical regulations holding a city and guilds test and inspection certificate together with professional indemnity insurance and able to demonstrate experience by being a member of a scheme (NAPIT, NICEIC,etc) is what a landlord should be seeking. This does mean that the client, the landlord, needs to be strong enough to ask current or new electricians to demonstrate their robustness and qualifications to carry out the works, ie. to do their due diligence. I foresee a time when through accident or incident when the EICR is called into question that a case could be brought against the landlord for having a non-compliant EICR which logically could expose the landlord to the minimum of a fine up to £30,000. Electricians are either ignorant of the landlords responsibilities or knowledgable that fear sells and has the opportunity to take the unwary on a ride.
For the landlord, start with the government website that identifies whether an electrician is registered to carry out tests and inspection, continue to the scheme (NAPIT, NICEIC, etc) websites to verify registration with the scheme, but, and a big but there does not appear to be a way of independently checking whether an electrician holds a current city and guilds test and inspect certificate. Competent persons schemes might show that an individual electrician has experience and knowledge but from my understanding it is not a requirement to carry out EICRs as the competent person schemes appear more to be self marketing operations by the poachers turned gamekeepers.
NICEIC on their website suggest that electricians are invited to ‘identify’ their test and inspect credentials on the government website but it is not mandatory. So an electrician can say to a client that they have test and inspect qualifications but the client will be unsure because they don’t appear on the government website and the credentials cannot be checked back against city and guilds so there is no independent means of verifying whether the electrician is being honest or not.
Landlords are robustly being held in the gun sites but they are not being provided with the means of defending themselves in the marketplace.
In these days of big data it should be possible to independently verify that in this particular instance an electrician has the full set of competencies to carry out the works at a reasonable cost for the landlord who has obligations to fulfil.
After doing all of the above I ditched two electricians due to the rather sidestepping language and directly ignoring the questions I asked. The third electrician Who carried out my EIC are appears on the government website to carry out test and inspect but on the day exposed that his city and guilds had run out but that he was covered by his gold card through the ECS scheme. When the EICR was issued it was accompanied by a scheme statement confirming that the company was registered as an approved electrician and domestic installer, no reference to city and guilds test and expect certification.
Used elsewhere on this particular thread I completely agree that the system stinks!

Reply to the comment left by Chris Bradley at 15/04/2021 - 10:06
Wrong unfortunately.

An electrician acting as the inspector DOES NOT need to be part of a CPS scheme- see the .gov rules.

Most will be. I am and would always advise using one.

I am concerned about misleading, incorrect and to be honest completely BS advice and info I see on these threads from 'armchair experts' purporting to give professional advice its frightening