BS7671 certficate

[Hallsy]

After trawling through many Part P debates on here, and wondering why I couldn't have bought my house a year sooner I started to wonder about my own qualifications.

I work in industry as an electrician, although my day in day out job now is electrical engineer/technician.

When I went to college I had to do various NVQ's in mech & elec. On the elec side it was basic wiring, understanding of regs and H&S, I did what was called a BET part 2 & 3 in electrical installation. Does this mean anything in the way of installation qualifications? I then carried on to do HND in Electrical Engineering.

Anyway, recently (before Part P) our firm put all sparks through the 16th ed BS7671 course, which I sat an exam for and passed. At the time I was under the impression that this would show that I was competent to work to BS7671 wiring regs. Since Part P has been about though it seems that having this certficate is worth nothing as I can't work to the regs competently as I am not seen as competent in the eye of Part P building regs.

Is it just another worthless qualification?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I presume the exam you passed was C&G 2381?

Dunno about the others, but (proper) qualifications are never worthless.

With the caveat that we don't know about your testing skills, you would appear to be competent to work to BS7671, and to issue EICs stating compliance with same.

Unless you register with one of the schemes, you can't self-certify compliance with the Building Regulations, that's all.

Don't feel too bad about it:

1) It's nothing to do with your competence - to be scrupulously fair, the fact that electrical installation work is now a controlled service it means that it has to comply with all of the Building Regulations, i.e. fire, structure, sound, insulation, access etc, so there is a bit more to know than just the electrical aspects.

2) It's nothing to do with your competence - Part P was introduced in order to give control of the domestic electrical installation market to the electrical contracting industry, and to do it with a cost structure that favoured the larger companies at the expense of the small and OMB operations.

 

[Hallsy]

BAS, you do well answering all these questions around the board!!

The exam I took, I can't remember the actual number I'll have to find the certificate, it was basically sit in a class room over a few days (yawn!!) covering everything in the regs and then sitting an exam answering questions from the regs.

It didn't cover the inspection & testing fully, there was a separate course for that, but it's doubtable that our company would put us all through that as there are already enough people who can certify m/c installations or do PAT testing. But even then you can't self cert unless you have calibrated test equipment which costs £££'s. I looked into it all and for the fact that I'd only be doing the odd private job and personal stuff it just didn't seem worth the cost to become Part P Self cert compliant. Then there's public liability insurance, etc... all to help the odd person out at the weekend at a knock down rate - it's easier to sit at work ona sunday for double time