Choosing an Electrician
Choosing an Electrician
Working on some home improvements but need new appliance installations for your kitchen, or perhaps you find yourself with a faulty wiring system in the living room. It seems it’s time to ring an electrician. But who do you call?
Finding the right handyman isn’t always the easiest of tasks, and it can be difficult to know where to start. There is always the worry you might end up with a ‘cowboy’ electrician, and as a result, frittering away hundreds of pounds on a job badly done.
Though this isn’t helped by statistics provided by the Ombudsman Services that show that six in 10 homeowners do not check credentials before commissioning a tradesperson to take on work at their property! However, what can you do to find the right electrician for you? What sort of certificates or qualifications should you be looking for? Well here are our recommendations.
Check if The Electrician is Registered
One of the most important steps you should take is choosing a registered electrician and it is also important they are officially approved by the Building Control department of your local authority. Apart from the obvious health and safety reasons as to why you should do this, there are also these to take into consideration:
- In the worst-case scenario, if something goes wrong, you will receive additional protections: your local authority can make sure the work is corrected
- You can run into issues trying to sell your home if you can’t show the correct electrical safety certificates when needed to
Start by checking if your local authority runs a ‘trusted trader scheme’, which you can check via a postcode search on the Trading Standards website. This means that any electricians registered on one of these schemes they have been vetted and adhere to trading standards.
You can also check through competentperson.co.uk to find a registered electrician, with a government approved scheme. Competent Person Schemes (CPS) were brought in by the government to certify their work complies with regulations, and they have to be registered with a scheme approved by The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), with these listed fully on their website at http://www.communities.gov.uk be able to verify as to whether they have a safety certificate of compliance confirming that they work to the UK national safety standard (BS 7671), which is necessary in order to conform to regulations to carry out electrical work.
An individual qualified and registered on one of these competent persons schemes can deal with Building Control on your behalf and has the ability to self-certify their work:
Make Sure They Can Provide Certificates When Complete
Having the relevant certificates once the job is finished is just as important as checking their qualifications before hiring them. You will need these for inspections and testing in the future. The certificates will be dependent on the scale of the task in question – smaller tasks may need a Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate, whilst large-scale jobs may require an Electrical Installation Certificate. Don’t forget to ask!