You will also know that I, and any other qualified electrician, is following the IET Wiring Regulations, electricians know this standard as BS7671! But, I hear you ask, what on earth is BS 7671? Well, this is the simplest explanation that I found on the internet:

 

“The IET Wiring Regulations is the national standard for electrical installations in domestic, commercial and industrial settings. It is the essential standard for all those concerned with the design, installation, certification and maintenance of electrical installations.”  

 

When should an MWC, along with associated testing, be provided to you? 

 

When a circuit has been altered or modified in any way, a Minor Works Certificate should be issued to you. An electrician needs to ensure that the circuit being worked upon complies with the latest wiring regulations before work can begin, and where possible it should be brought up to standard if this is what’s required to ensure your safety. If there are issues found during testing then the electrician needs to ensure that any work will not impact upon a fault, and that it is ready to be worked on and that it is safe for you, the customer. Therefore there may, from time-to-time, be an additional cost to the job so that these works can be carried out. 

 

Why does Minor Works Testing need to be Completed? 

 

Think of it like this… if you’ve just moved into a house that is more than 10 years old, how do you know that the last owner of your home didn’t do something really stupid and leave some live cabling dangling about, or worse still damaged the circuit to a point in which it’s dangerous… Now, much of the time there are only very small rectifiable problems, and all is well but there have been many times when I have come across issues that need to be fixed for the safety of your family or a workaround has to be sorted!

 

In the short clip below is one such example… this was supposed to be a “Minor Works'' job i.e. adding an outdoor socket, however the condition of the electrical installation, which must have been up to 50-60+ years old in places, could not be modified to meet today's regulations, so the solution was to “upgrade” the job from a MWC to an EIC (Electrical Installation Certificate), which meant that the work was now notifiable and Building Control would need to be notified, only a Part P registered electrician can (or should be!) completing this kind of work.

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