Electrical Safety - Inpecting And Testing

By Author: birmingham Business
Total Articles: 5
Comment this article

All electrical installations occuring in current days must be performed in accordance with British Standards 7671 - 2008. All electrical installations will, hopefully, have been carried out to the relevant requirements for electrical installs that were in force at the time of installation. In order to ensure that all existing electrical installations are safe periodic testing and inspection should be performed. The UK's ‘Electricity at Work Regulations of 1989' which became law in the early 1990's and the previous Safety at Work act of nineteen seventy four made it a legal requirent that every business must be safe for use by it's employees, their customers and the general public. Government figures illustrate that an average of ten people are fatally injured and around seven hundred and fifty others are caused serious injury by unsafe electrical systems either in the home or place of work. Non-safe electrical systems are the source of a large amount of fires, and although fatalities are thank fully an usual happening they do still happen and fire damage to property, industrial machinery, office equipment and also personal ...
... property can be a great inconvenience and very disruptive to businesses. To minimise the risks of similar accidents occurring routine checks are necessary, and due to the fact that there can be years inbetween formal inspections it is a good precaution to sporadically check for signs of excessive wear, breakages, missing parts, loose fitting or examples of over heating in electrical equipment and switch gear. Such small operations as operating the test button on RCD (residual current devices) on various occasions can become be a lifesaving operation. Thankfully regular checks don't have to be carried out by a qualified electrician, as long as they are familiar in the use of the installation and as such able to see any defects that could have become visible. Insurance providers are now often likely to ask that the right precautions are in operation for the protection and maintenance of the policy owners offices. It is now quite common for insurers to have specific clauses refering to the electrical installation and can request evidence that a current report certificate is in force throughout the life of the policy. Failure to do so can be interpretted as negligence on the policy holders behalf and so subsequently invalidate the policy. The period between inspections is different depending on the type of install and it's use and operation. For general commercial installations the allowable period between electrical testing and inspection is five years, there are exceptions however and you'll need to check for your particular premises, some public buildings such as leisure centres and theatres have a max time of three years and for cinemas this can be between 1 and 3 years. Routine inspections are often a yearly event, with educational buildings subject to routine inspections each four months. Domestic installations are subject to a maximum 10 year period between inspections, or of course on change of ownership. Specialist systems can vary enormously in their maximum time between inspection, some where between three months and six years, there are far too many types of special installs to list here.