Survey flagged
the wiring in
your house?
Almost every survey does. The useful question is not whether it needs testing, it is what the remedial work will actually cost once it has been tested.
Surveyors are not
electricians.
A surveyor is not permitted to test an electrical installation. They look at the consumer unit, note its age and type, look at accessible sockets and switches, and then recommend that a qualified electrician tests the system. That recommendation appears in almost every report on almost every property, which is why it is easy to dismiss.
What makes it worth attention is the specific detail. If the report notes an older style fuse board with rewireable fuses, no residual current device, or a mixture of cabling types, those are concrete observations rather than a standard caveat.
The other signal is rubber or fabric insulated cable. Rubber insulation from the middle of the last century becomes brittle and crumbles, and once it does the conductors inside are no longer reliably separated. That is a genuine reason to rewire rather than a preference.
Age alone does not condemn an installation. Plenty of installations from the 1980s onwards are perfectly serviceable with a consumer unit upgrade rather than a full rewire, and the test is what tells you which.
The test is cheap.
The work is not.
An electrical condition report tells you the state of the installation and grades any faults. C1 means danger present and requires immediate action. C2 means potentially dangerous and remedial action is required. C3 is an improvement recommendation and does not make a report unsatisfactory.
The trap is treating the test as the job. The test is the diagnosis, and it is comparatively inexpensive. What follows the test is the actual expenditure, and it is entirely unknown until the test has been done.
This is why we price the remedial work rather than selling a certificate. A test that produces a list of C2 items and no plan to fix them has moved you no further forward, and you will need to hand that list to somebody eventually.
The work itself is carried out by NICEIC engineers, who certify it in their own name. GMAS coordinates the whole sequence and carries out everything around it.
Rewiring destroys
your walls.
This is the single most underestimated part of electrical work in an occupied house. A rewire means chasing channels into every wall the cables run through, lifting floorboards, and cutting into ceilings. That is not damage caused by carelessness, it is inherent to the job.
What people discover afterwards is that the electrician's price covered the electrical work and stopped there. The chases are filled roughly, the walls need replastering, the floors need relaying, and the decoration needs redoing throughout. Those are three separate trades and three separate mobilisations, and they usually cost a meaningful fraction of the rewire itself.
Doing it under one firm removes that gap. We plaster after our own first fix, so nobody is waiting on anybody, and the making good is priced at the start rather than discovered at the end.
It also changes the sequencing advice. If you are going to rewire, it is worth doing before you decorate, before you lay flooring, and ideally at the same time as any plumbing or heating work that involves the same floors and walls.
Often the whole job
rather than a rewire.
Replacing the consumer unit is a much smaller piece of work than a rewire and it is frequently what the survey is actually pointing at. A modern board provides residual current protection that older boards with rewireable fuses do not.
The important qualification is that a new consumer unit cannot be installed onto an installation that will not support it. The circuits have to be tested first, because a new board with RCD protection will reveal faults that the old board was quietly tolerating. That is not the new board causing problems, it is the new board doing its job.
So the honest order is test, then decide. Sometimes the answer is a board change and two circuits attended to. Sometimes the test finds enough to justify a rewire. Anyone quoting either before testing is guessing.
Questions we get
asked most.
Get a written
price.
Monday to Saturday, 9am to 8pm. All London boroughs.
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Areas we cover.
We take consumer unit and fuse box work across all 32 London boroughs. Most of our work is in west London, in Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Fulham, Kensington, Chiswick and White City, and in south west London, in Putney, Wandsworth and Wimbledon. We also work in south east London, in Greenwich, Blackheath and Lewisham.
If your property is outside these areas, call us anyway. We travel across London and will tell you honestly if a job is too far to price properly.