Making sense of a periodic inspection report for a house purchase

stressedhousebuyer

Dear all
This is my first post. Please can any electrician advise? I am trying to buy a 5 bedroom house built in 1910 and have paid £230 for an inspection report. Getting this report in was timeconsuming, as the electrician needed to go in twice to the property, once for the report and again to quote on the work required.

I am struggling to understand the report, which says overall that the electrics are unsatisfactory. Most of the report is code 2, and a few items are code 4. The overall comments are that " the installation has been upgraded to the 16th edition of BS7671 with split load consumer units but lighting circuits have no earth conductors with class 1 (metal) light fittings. Main bonding to gas supply not located and supplementary bonding reqired in bathroom. Various items in G coded 2 need attention"

We now have a quote to put this right and the quote is £6500 plus vat. The quote does not really describe the work, it just lists alot of rooms and light sockets and fittings with a price at the bottom, so together with the report I am really confused. We also have a damp report which does make sense to me.

Basically my issue is this- we have budgeted for various works but not electric upgrade as we were told it was OK. Does the work really need to be done, and should it cost this much? I am worried that the sellers are unlikely to drop the price by this much for elec alone, on top of damp etc at another £3000, and I am not sure how important or necessary all the work is, or whether the price is right.

Meanwhile, we have moved across the country to Shropshire, are stuck in a tiny rented house for home working and 3 kids, and there is nothing else to buy. The vendor pulled out of the last house we tried to buy for no apparent reason, having invited my kids to "pick their bedrooms" well into the sale.

Can anyone advise?? We are at the end of our tether here.

kippen_noedel

get more than one quote and speak to the vendor, show them the report and explain your concerns, they still have to sell the property, if the report is genuine then any other inspection will find the same problems and the vendor will still be in the same position.

remember just going 50/50 on the work will not cover all your costs and inconvenience, you will still have some redecoration to do afterwords.

Cardew

Welcome to the forum.

I will probably make myself unpopular with both gas fitters and electricians here!!!

Electricians have managed to get the Health and Safety Executive on their side by playing the 'safety card' - much as 'Gas Safe' (was Corgi) and many see it as a licence to print money.

The law is such that just about the only electrical work a non-certified electrician can carry out in the house is to change a 13 amp plug!!(not quite - but you get my drift)

The standards of electrical wiring in new houses is more stringent than yesteryear, and I suspect almost all of our houses would not meet those stricter standards. However that doesn't mean that they are unsafe.!

£6,500 + VAT seems to be a crazy price - even for complete rewiring of a house. Especially as the house has obviously been upgraded to have split load consumer units instead of the original 1910 fuse box.

Certainly you need to get other quotes, and specify you need to know what is essential from a safety aspect, and what is desirable.

For instance, would it be cheaper to replace unearthed metal light fittings with non-metalic than rewiring?

I would also give the Health and Safety Executive a call for general advice on your report - they won't comment on specifics, but might have an 'idiot's guide' to the implications of the various codes.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/electricity/faq.htm

stressedhousebuyer

thanks for your replies.

It is a large house, but we both work from home and have 3 kids at home and 2 adult ones so we need the space. The electrics seem Ok in places but pretty old in other parts of the house. The report says the electric installation is 25 years old, but clearly there are a few modern additions and quite a few spurs off existing sockets in the kitchen.

The house is tall and narrow- four floors- and I dont know whether that makes a difference to the price.

I agree about the new regulations- it did occur to me too that probably no house over 18 months old is likely to meet the grade. That leaves the question for people like me, what really are the problems and the cost?

kippen_noedel

buy the stuff you need yourself then a pay qualified electrician £150pd to connect everything up & a labourer £50pd to lay/pull cables etc, should knock the bill in half without breaking any sweat..

macman

All you have is a house that was rewired but without earthing the lighting circuits. There must be millions of houses in the UK that don't have this, as it only became commonplace in the 60's. No doubt the reason it wasn't done at the time of the last rewire is that it would mess up all the decorations to recable the drops to the light switches.
With non-metal switches and the right light fittings it would be safe enough, though obviously not up to present-day standards.
The bonding work required is not expensive.
You will no doubt find other aspects of the construction (notably the foundations) of older houses that wouldn't begin to pass building control today, it doesn't mean that they are dangerous.
£6.5K for this work seems absurdly high, even with a sizable property such as this.

stressedhousebuyer

Kippen Noedel, thanks, but if I thought this would work I honestly would. But who? I suspect that part of the problem is even finding an electrician with time around here. We sought the reports more than a month ago and a few electricians werent even keen to come out, even though a fee is charged (£230) for these reports. The one we did find took nearly a month to go in, do the report, then go back to assess the cost of the work (they used different staff for each). A couple of smaller firms were too busy to come.

What I am think I am going to do is to call them and ask which work is critical and which is not, compared with an average house elsewhere. I did see that the basement level has a few old fashioned twisted wires and one light fitting attached to a wooden block interwar style, but elsewhere it is better.

I think that, as all the house buying surveys show at the moment, nobody is selling a house (keeping prices quite high here, and everything of a good size under offer- this fits the national picture) , coupled with all of the non- sellers upgrading their homes instead. Bound to keep builders very busy, and able to quote high!!

Ken68

With the continuing credit crunch, would have thought it was a buyers market.
Case of shopping around.

olly300

stressedhousebuyer wrote: »

I think that, as all the house buying surveys show at the moment, nobody is selling a house (keeping prices quite high here, and everything of a good size under offer- this fits the national picture) , coupled with all of the non- sellers upgrading their homes instead. Bound to keep builders very busy, and able to quote high!!

Nope it's always been the way unfortunately.

Lots of builders try and avoid doing work on domestic properties especially if they are old ones and don't involve an extension as the work is harder to do. For example newer properties have plaster board walls. There as older properties can have walls made of any material for example my own flat has brick internal walls, and the electrics can be any how.

In addition domestic customers can be a pain in the a*** as they tend to not know what to expect, can change their mind frequently and be a general nuisance in getting the work done i.e. need to live in the property while the work is being done. I only know this because I have spoken to a few people in the building trade.

stressedhousebuyer

Thanks to all. I thought you would be interested in the outcome of this story. I contacted the electrician yesterday, after a sleepless night trying to work out whether to proceed with this house, and he actually said that nothing actually needed to be done. He accepted that nearly every house wouldnt meet 2008 standards, unless done in the last 8 months. There are a few things- less than £200 work- which are advisable, although unlikely to be dangerous if not done, and he suggested the wiring could be upgraded on a room by room basis as the house was done up (which it needs- it is quite tired). So almost one extreme to the other. I thought at the beginning of this process that the agent selling the house was wrong to suggest that a full structural survey (£870) and elec report (230) and damp (70) were a waste of money, but now I'm not so sure that I couldnt have learned as much useful information (if not more) with the cheapest survey and a trip round the house with a good builder. Everyone is so obliged to cover themselves legally for official inspection reports, it makes them useless in practice.

Finally, to the contributor who thought it was a buyers market- its alot more complicated than that at the moment. There are lots of certain kinds of houses and they are not going up in price, but anything bigger, or for example with good features or a decent sized garden, is flying off the shelves. Even houses which have sat in our town for two years unsold are all under offer since September, because there is simply not enough on the market to buy. This is temporarily putting some vendors in a very good position.

Andy_WSM

Ken68 wrote: »

With the continuing credit crunch, would have thought it was a buyers market.
Case of shopping around.

It's not a buyers market though is it, with prices creeping up everywhere.

There is also a lack of propert on the market making houses more "desirable" if you find one you like.

With regards the electrics, you really need the surveyor to tell you what HAS to be done now to make the property safe, not what would be nice to get done. No seller is going to want to pay to rewire a house to current regs so that they can move on and probably have to do all that work again at their next place! - EDIT, see you did just that, sorry!