Your consumer unit, the fuse box, is where the electrics in your home split into circuits. The older Wylex boxes with screw-in or rewireable fuses do that splitting, but they don’t do much protecting. A rewireable fuse will blow on a bad overload, but it won’t cut the power fast enough to stop a shock if someone touches a live wire or a faulty appliance.
An RCD will. It watches for current leaking to earth, whether through a person, a nicked cable or water in an outdoor socket, and trips in a fraction of a second. We fit a metal 18th Edition board with an RCD or an individual RCBO on every circuit, add surge protection (an SPD) where it earns its place, then test, label and certify the lot and notify building control through our NICEIC registration.
A plastic board isn’t automatically unsafe, but the 18th Edition now asks for a metal enclosure in a home, so it’s often worth doing when something else needs changing anyway. Not sure where yours stands? Send a photo and we’ll tell you honestly whether it needs touching.
Tell us the job and your postcode. We usually pick up, and if we’re on the tools, we call straight back.
We look at what’s actually needed and give you a free, fixed price. Hourly work is charged at our published rates.
We turn up when we said, keep it tidy, test everything and hand over the certificates, with notifiable work registered through NICEIC.
No, there’s no law that makes you upgrade a working board just because it’s old. But an installation with no RCD will usually come back as a code on an EICR, and if you’re letting the property that EICR has to be satisfactory. Most people end up changing the board because of that, or because they’d simply rather have the protection.
Only while the board is actually being swapped, usually a few hours in the middle of the job, not the whole day. If you work from home or need the fridge-freezer kept going, tell us and we’ll plan around it.
Both cut the power on an earth fault; the difference is how much they take out with them. An RCD covers a group of circuits, so a fault on one can trip several at once. An RCBO sits on a single circuit on its own, so a fault on the kitchen won’t plunge the bedrooms into darkness. We’ll tell you which makes sense for your place rather than pushing the dearest option.
An Electrical Installation Certificate, a labelled schedule of every circuit, and the building control notification handled for you under Part P through our NICEIC registration. Worth keeping with your house papers, as a buyer’s solicitor or a letting agent will often ask for it.
Sometimes. An older installation occasionally needs its main earthing or bonding bringing up to scratch before a new board can be signed off, because you can’t certify a board sitting on poor earthing. That’s exactly why we look before we quote, so any of that is in the fixed price and not a surprise on the day.
Send a photo of your current fuse box, the whole thing with the door open if you can, and we’ll tell you roughly what a swap would cost and whether it’s even worth doing yet. No hard sell.