What is a "domestic electrician" ?
We use to call them house bashers, and when I trained one could do commercial, industrial or domestic and I would revert to domestic when I could not get a well paid job in the other options.
But in I think 2004 the Part P came out, so I stopped doing domestic, it was not worth it for the few jobs I did to pay the scheme providers their fees.
Since then we have had the "Smart" devices move into the domestic market, and I know with the industrial we had problems with mobile phones messing up machines, the workers thought we were being unreasonable to ban mobile phones in the work place, but a PLC controlled machine going berserk is not funny.
I had problems finding an expert in ASii control, and I had to learn how to do it myself, things have moved on, my son gets a phone call from work, and he can view the system from home on his PC, and either fix it from home, or give detailed instructions on how to fix it to a man on site, rare does he have to actually drive in, SCARDA has really transformed the control of machines, and now we do have people trained in its maintenance.
But what happens when my central heating starts to auto switch to Eco settings, who can fix it? This happened, and I did work out why, the EE mast had been taken out in the high winds, so my geofencing thought I was not home. But it took me some time to find this out, as every time I approached the thermostat the built in PIR turned heating back to comfort mode. Cure was turn of geofencing.
However had I been called to some one else's home, would I find out what was the problem? And that one was simple. Also with central heating, had a wireless thermostat loose sensitivity, and fail to turn the heating off in mothers house. Even as a radio amateur I had little which could be used to work out was it interference, and if so from what. The thermostat
it seems is now well known for the problem, and better quality like these,
auto turn off with loss of coms within ½ an hour. But compared to what we are not getting in the home, these are rather simple problems.
I watch the TV advert of the Freddy Boswell look alike clapping hands and turning lights on and off, after having a smart meter fitted, and wonder what those not in the trade actually expect a smart meter to do? I was conned as to what Nest Gen 3 could do,
this guide from the heating hub says to question "Works with Smart TRVs" "Yes - Energenie" this is not really true since Google took over Nest, the Energenie app can control the Nest wall thermostat, but there is no integration between the TRV and the wall thermostat.
So some electrician is faced with this problem, he has like me read the instructions, and tried to set it up, and like me failed, the cure is to rip out and fit some thing like Drayton Wiser, but like me that is rather an expensive option. And it took some time before I got the reply from Energenie to say support from Nest has been withdrawn.
So the domestic electrician has got his work cut out today, no longer deserves the name house basher, but can he actually work on this stuff?
The Plumbers seem to have raised a new trade, the heating and ventilation engineer, ups sorry over level 3 to be an engineer so a profession not trade. Will we get the "Smart Electrician" some one trained in how to maintain so called smart devices, it does seem a new name for telemetry is smart, nothing to do with working things out.
But back to the real question, who are you going to call, clearly not ghost busters, but when my lights start to flash like a cars indicators, who can find the problem? I assume due to too many smart devices and them interfering with one another, so reverted to a manual switch, easy for me, but if as an electrician I had fitted that switch to some ones home, then I need to fix it, just replacing with manual switch is not really an option, and turning power off then back on it would work OK for a week, so how would that electrician know if he had fixed the problem?
The switch cost £20 approx, the hub cost £50 for an electrician to loose £70 by fitting an alternative when it goes wrong is a lot to absorb for such a small job.