Your fuse box or “Consumer Unit” is the engine for your electricity in your home.
Your Fuse Board/ Consumer unit is what houses your circuit breakers. Circuit breakers are the last line of defence, if there is an electrical fault in your house. Your Consumer Unit and circuit breakers should be designed to trip or “break” the electrical supply under fault conditions.
The issue is that older Consumer Units may not meet the current electrical standards. This is usually determined by carrying out an electrical inspection and test in your home – like a MOT for your car. This inspection and test is called an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) and should be carried out at a minimum of every 10 years.
Electrical engineers have concluded that your house should have 30mA protection on the majority of your circuits and that your circuits should trip within 200milli seconds under certain fault conditions. The reason for this is if you get an electrical shock higher than 30mA and longer than 200ms it may be enough to induce a heart attack and internal burns. Normally in your home the circuits that need this protection are: Sockets, lighting and anything in your bathrooms like an electric shower. Other circuits may include cables buried a certain depth in the walls in your house and cables going outside which may be buried in the ground or supplying sheds, hot tubs and accessories. If your Consumer Unit does not meet this standard no Electrician should be carrying out certain electrical work in your house. This could be from installing addition circuits or additional wiring accessories like sockets and lights.
We only fit the following as standard:
Surge Protection Device – This comes with our Consumer Units and helps protects your full house from electrical surges that may happen out in the street and lightning strikes. Both can severely damage your equipment like fridges, ovens, laptops, tv’s and lights
RCBO – Every circuit is individually protected by its own 30mA trip switch known as Residual current Circuit Breaker with Overcurrent protection or RCBO for short. This is instead of having a Residual Current Device or RCD which typically protects 3 or 4 circuits at a time. This means you will know exactly what circuit has the fault and if you have a fault on one circuit it is only tripping that circuit and no other circuits are affected. Which is important if you have medical equipment or that it doesn’t unnecessarily turn of a socket supplying your fridge or freezer, spoiling your food.
Our Consumer Units are a brand called Fusebox. An established brand that is well made and has plenty of stock. This is important as it mitigates manufacturing defaults and less chance of going obsolete meaning additional RCBO’s are easy to source if needed for adding future circuits. All this conforms to, and at times goes above, current electrical standards. In affect future proofing your install.
Due to most Consumer Unit upgrades taking place in older properties we carry out the EICR first. Depending on the size of the house this usually takes between 2-4 hours. An EICR checks there is no underlying electrical issues. Some issues may require further investigation or remedial work to be under taken before the new Consumer Unit is fitted. We do not fix anything during an EICR it is solely a report on the electrical installation of your home. This lets us know that the circuits are fit for purpose and the Consumer Unit can be upgraded. Due to the new Consumer Unit being more sensitive to electrical faults just because the circuit works with the old, less sensitive board does not mean the electrical install is fit for purpose or it will work with the new Consumer Unit.
As a registered Electrical Company, we are required by law to leave your installation in a safe working manner. The only way for us to do this is by carrying out an EICR prior to an upgrade.
Our Process:
1: Carry out an EICR on the existing installation.
2: Any remedial work associated with the EICR to be completed prior to upgrading Consumer Unit.
3: Install of new Consumer Unit.
4: Retest and issue Electrical Installation Certificate for new Consumer Unit.
This work normally takes up to 8hrs. We normally split it over 2 half days. One morning to carry out the EICR and another morning to carry out the upgrade.
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