buying a house

[lanswerted]

hello again,

the house has not gone away yet. at the moment there is a difference of 10k between my offer and seller expectation. my current best offer is 92% off asking price, bearing in mind the price was reduced in october. i think we may crack this one withba little bit more work.

anyhow onto the electrics, they must be bad cause the seller is getting them inspected and the cu changed. i told the ea that this will not make a difference as I would still want my own inspection.
they may well put a nice new cu and rc but who is to say it will not trip if cables are from 1970s? vendir may not bother fixing faulty circuits and there may not be scope for extra sockets

i am pasting the latest info i got from the ea on the electrics:

"he has an electrical engineer coming to the house on Wednesday for around 4 hours to perform an electrical (what you mentioned in your previous email) then they will return to install a new RCD and consumer unit, then a final recheck of everything will be done in order for the certificate to be issued"

now i know this may be ea bull but does the process sound correct? visit property, go away, come back and install cu, go away and then re check again.

 

[Doggit]

Well, they can only install the CU if it passes the EICR, so they're either extremely confident that it will, or they're going to install it, shyte or bust. So why are they not just testing and installing the CU on the same day.

 

[lanswerted]

yes i find it weird but it is an ea explaining the process.
apparently it is an electrician the ea uses for lettings etc etc.
i will still do my own inspection anyway.

 

[EFLImpudence]

They could fit a new CU whatever the EICR states.

Obviously if they find any faults that would cause an RCD to trip, they will have to be rectified.

I don't see that different days (go away, come back sounds derogatory) make any difference.

 

[winston1]

Supposing the new CU is not got enough ways for any extra circuits you want in the future. Much better if it is left alone and you get a new CU to your liking after you have bought it.

 

[Doggit]

Sorry EFL, maybe it's just a difference in the way of looking at it. The impression seems to be that they're going to fit a new CU to try and make the purchaser happy. The OP needs reassurance that the electrics are okay, and as Winston suggests, shouldn't the choice be better made by the purchaser when they know their requirements.

Yes, your right when you say that they can fit the new CU regardless of any faults they find, but is that good practice.

 

[EFLImpudence]

Sorry EFL, maybe it's just a difference in the way of looking at it. The impression seems to be that they're going to fit a new CU to try and make the purchaser happy. The OP needs reassurance that the electrics are okay, and as Winston suggests, shouldn't the choice be better made by the purchaser when they know their requirements.

Yes.
As Ian does not trust the sellers, there isn't much point them doing anything - other than drop the price.

Yes, your right when you say that they can fit the new CU regardless of any faults they find, but is that good practice.

Well, it depends what the faults are, other than faults causing RCD tripping - and they could be masked if Ian does not know what he is looking at.

 

[Risteard]

Well, they can only install the CU if it passes the EICR

Not really true. There is no "pass" or "fail" for an EICR anyway.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Well...

Yes. There are no tick boxes or overall results for "pass" or "fail". It is indeed just a report on the condition of an electrical installation.

Or.

No. Get with the real world. An EICR with no C#/FI on it is a "pass". An EICR stuffed full of C1s is a "fail". In between whatever extremes you care to delineate are indeterminate "verdicts". But be in no mistake that in the real world there are indeed, for all practical purposes, and the purposes for which EICR is commissioned, installations which can "fail". In the real world there are indeed installations which can have enough C#s recorded that no responsible electrician would go anywhere near replacing the CU and leave everything else alone.

 

[lanswerted]

ban all sheds i don' t really understand what you are getting at.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I was replying to Risteard, pointing out that although technically true, because there is no Pass/Fail result of an EICR for an installation, it's not like an MOT, in practical terms there is. If an inspection doesn't flag up any concerns, everybody ought to be happy with saying "it passed", and conversely if a number of serious problems are found it is reasonable to say "it failed".

 

[John D v2.0]

anyhow onto the electrics, they must be bad cause the seller is getting them inspected and the cu changed

Not necessarily, could be just the seller thinks that's causing you to reduce your offer so if he spends 1k on electrical work he will get back 5k in increased value.
Hell, if I had a brand new cu in perfect condition and I would get 5k back on a purchase id happily bin it and get a fresh one installed!
Negotiation isn't anything about reality, it's just about getting to a sale one way or another. Good luck.

Ps regarding the ring size limit, probably once someone put a circular ring covering a massive area on 2 floors and melted something by plugging loads of fan heaters, then they introduced a "don't go crazy" reg based on an arbitrary large figure. If you plug in one fan heater in each room the average figure after diversity is probably ok for electric heating.
They probably didn't expect such scrutiny on the detail all these years later

 

[SimonH2]

... to install a new RCD and consumer unit...

Supposing the new CU is not got enough ways for any extra circuits you want in the future. Much better if it is left alone and you get a new CU to your liking after you have bought it.

More to the point, it means you'll get whatever can be done for the least outlay - so (as you point out) no spare ways, minimal number of RCDs (possibly just one), and so on.
I'm in a similar position here. Not long before we bought the house, they had it partially rewired and a new CU. The CU has just one spare way, and an RCD for the master switch. There's a separate CU in the extension (again with a single RCD) - because they didn't want to run separate cables to the original CU location.
So at some point that brand new CU will get thrown out and I'll fit something that suits my needs. It "irks me" that I'll have paid (at least in part) for this CU that I'll be throwing away and replacing with something more suitable.

But it's a fairly minor point - it was the house we wanted, or rather the plot and it's location, and I knew just from looking that there are "some issues" that need dealing with. Seems the vendor's father in law thought he knew more about electrics than he did.

I also had an issue buying a house a few years ago - had the gas checked before buying and the boiler wasn't working. Had it been terminal and they'd offered to put a new boiler in, I'd have said they should just drop the price by the what they would be spending on it - that way, I'd be able to choose the new boiler to be installed, rather than getting whatever the vendor could get the cheapest.

 

[JohnW2]

Ps regarding the ring size limit, probably once someone put a circular ring covering a massive area on 2 floors and melted something by plugging loads of fan heaters, then they introduced a "don't go crazy" reg based on an arbitrary large figure.

Indeed, as I have been trying to point out to EFLI, it seems very probable that the 'limits' arose because someone was 'trying their best' to do what was essentially 'the impossible', by trying to condense into a regulation the common sense of designing a circuit such that overloads were 'unlikely' (a requirement which essentially does exist, today, as a regulation).

Let's face it, without assumptions (aka wild guesses) about 'what might be plugged in', any 32A sockets circuit with more than one double socket (or two single sockets), or any 20A sockets circuit with more than just one single socket, is theoretically at risk of becoming 'overloaded'. Hence, all one can rely rely on is common sense, coupled with whatever information is available about the likely use of sockets (under current occupancy).

As for your actual comment, hopefully nothing will have 'melted' with any properly designed circuit, since the whole point of matching the OPD to the CCC of the cable is to avoid the cable ever getting anywhere near the point of melting.

Kind Regards, John

 

[EFLImpudence]

any 32A sockets circuit with more than one double socket (or two single sockets), or any 20A sockets circuit with more than just one single socket, is theoretically at risk of becoming 'overloaded'.

Exactly, and what floor area would that cover?

Incidentally, why does this spurious limit NOT apply to socket radial circuits?