Every single year, thousands of properties and homes across the UK experience incidents and electrical fires caused purely by faults in their electrical systems. This is, sadly, a cause of serious injury and fatality across the country, making electrical safety an important and worthy cause to talk about.
As each property in the UK whether commercial or residential uses more appliances each year, it’s a simple matter of time before the average property sees an accident of its own – unless they invest in education and in fixed wired testing from a team like Quest Electrical.
With that safety in mind, we’ve gathered a simple set of tips to help ensure your property is safe to use. Please keep in mind these aren’t an equivalent for the regular testing of your property that is required by law!
Start with the basics: Understand your main switches.
Every property has a fusebox, which is also often referred to as a consumer unit. It’s also possible for a property to have more than one main switch; an example of this is if you have several storage heaters that are electric. Make sure you know where your fuse boxes are and ensure you can access them at all times.
Circuit breakers and fuses.
It’s common for a property to contain electrical equipment that uses fuses. These are often a re-wire design, meaning they will operate by melting when a current too strong for the fuse flows through it, cutting off the circuit to prevent an incident via overloading.
Circuit breakers perform a similar function but are generally more modern and effective. They’re better at showing more precisely when and where the trip occurred, but you need to be sure to fix the issue before resetting your circuit.
Circuit breakers generally blow for a few key reasons: short-circuit faults, ground faults, incorrect breakers and overloads. Short circuit faults occur when a very high current is drawn through a circuit, usually via a connection being made between a neutral and live conductor. When you have a live element that connects to something outside the circuit, it’s a ground fault.
How to tell if your wiring is too old.
Interestingly, you can generally tell if wiring in a property is old based on visual points such as the colours used in its design. An example of this is cables; the thick, black rubber coating you may have seen (or have in your property) indicates a kind of cabling that was last used in the 60s. Similarly, cables that are coated in lead or fabric, and fuse boxes which have wood in their construction, both point to designs prior to the 60s.
Leave it to the professionals.
While it’s possible to learn the basics of electrical wiring and safety yourself, it’s still important to be ready to pass the work on to a certified professional. Arranging a schedule that suits you best is perfectly possible, making it easier to manage your safety and compliance requirements with minimal disruption to business or general access to your property.
Better yet, your certified engineer will be happy to recommend areas where you could save money via energy-saving equipment or a modest upgrade. That’s a real benefit to property owners; there have been many tales of significant savings made simply by swapping bulbs and rethinking the design. That’s a benefit to your bottom line at the same time as when you address your safety and compliance. Not bad for a day’s work, if you ask us!
We hope you found this article handy and informative. Stay safe!
