Consumer Unit Replacement near you

These three get mixed up constantly, and the difference decides both the disruption and the sequence. A board change replaces the enclosure and the protective devices, and assumes the circuits behind it are sound enough to reconnect. Remedial work puts right specific faults found on specific circuits, and may or may not need the board touched at all. A rewire replaces the cabling itself, room by room, and the board change is simply the last part of it.

A new board on old cabling is not automatically wrong. Plenty of installations have decades of service left in the wiring and an enclosure that has run out of future. What is wrong is a board change quoted as though the circuits behind it have already passed their tests. Ask any electrician quoting for a replacement what happens if a circuit fails when it is tested on the day, because the honest answer, an isolated circuit, a written explanation and a separate price, is also the answer that tells you the quote was not built on optimism.

Sequence matters where money is tight. If the cabling is the problem, a new board buys you protection but not a solution, and it will be paid for twice when the rewire follows. If the enclosure is the problem, remedial work on individual circuits leaves the actual defect on the wall.

An Electrical Installation Condition Report, usually shortened to EICR, is the document that most often puts a consumer unit replacement on the table, and its classification codes are worth understanding before anyone quotes against it. Government guidance for the rented sector sets them out plainly. C1 means danger present, with a risk of injury. C2 means potentially dangerous. C3 means improvement recommended, and does not require remedial work. FI means further investigation is required without delay.

The practical consequence is that a C3 is information rather than an instruction. An older board with no residual current protection frequently attracts observations that sit at C3, which means the report is telling you the installation is not built to today's standard, not that it is unsafe today. C1 and C2 are different: they describe a condition to be put right, and they are the codes that make a report unsatisfactory.

In the rented sector in England the codes carry deadlines. The regulations require installations to be inspected and tested at least every five years by a qualified person, and where the report requires remedial or further investigative work, it must be carried out within 28 days, or any shorter period specified in the report. Government guidance now covers both the private and the social rented sectors, with the social housing requirements having come into force on 1 November 2025 and transitional provision for existing tenancies until 1 May 2026. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own rented-sector electrical safety duties, so check the rule for the nation the property sits in.

A consumer unit replacement is an alteration to an existing installation, and BS 7671 does not let an alteration be made in isolation. The IET points to regulation 132.16, which requires an assessment of the existing installation, including the distributor's equipment and the earthing and bonding arrangements, to determine whether they are adequate for the altered circumstances. That is why a good electrician spends time at the incoming supply before they price the board, and why a quote given from a photograph of the front cover is a guess.

The two things being assessed are not the same thing, although they are constantly confused. As the IET puts it, earthing connects exposed-conductive-parts to the main earthing terminal to provide a path for fault current, while protective bonding connects extraneous-conductive-parts to the main earthing terminal to prevent a potential difference that would create a hazardous touch voltage. They do different jobs, and a board change is the moment both get checked properly.

Bonding is also where the modern house surprises people. The IET notes the common misconception that all water pipes require protective bonding: where the incoming water service pipe is plastic and there is no fortuitous contact with earth, it is not an extraneous-conductive-part and does not require bonding. So the answer to whether your house needs a bonding conductor to the water main depends on what the pipe under your floor is made of, which is exactly the sort of thing that has to be looked at rather than assumed. The type of earthing arrangement the network operator has given you matters too, and the operator declares the figures the electrician designs to.

On LokalMatch the route to a quote is deliberately plain. You describe the board you have, what prompted the question and your postcode, once, and electricians covering your area contact you. Pros pay for the enquiries they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out work, does not set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that reply.

If a quote includes a line you have never heard of, it is likely to be this one. The IET describes arc fault detection devices, or AFDDs, as protective devices installed in consumer units to provide protection from arc faults, using microprocessor technology to analyse the waveform and cut power to the circuit when it sees a signature that indicates arcing. They address a failure mode that neither a circuit breaker nor an earth leakage device is designed to catch: a loose terminal or a damaged cable arcing quietly behind a wall.

The status is worth stating precisely, because it is often oversold. The IET says that in the current edition of the IET Wiring Regulations, BS 7671:2018, it is a recommendation to install AFDDs and the customer can choose to omit them, weighing the relevant risk and safety factors against the cost. The recommendation is aimed at particular situations rather than every dwelling.

Approved Document P reproduces the notification rule directly from regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations, and it is short enough to quote. Notice must be given where the work consists of the installation of a new circuit, the replacement of a consumer unit, or any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location. A consumer unit replacement is therefore not a marginal case or a matter of interpretation. It is named.

There are three procedures for getting notifiable work signed off in England. The installer can be registered with a competent person scheme and self-certify, which is by far the most common route and the reason most homeowners never speak to building control at all. Alternatively the work can be notified to a building control body before it starts, or certified by a registered third-party certifier. Government publishes which schemes are authorised, so an installer's claim to be registered is checkable rather than a matter of trust.

Elsewhere in the UK the machinery differs and the vocabulary changes with it. Welsh Government publishes its own guidance on building regulations and electrical work. In Scotland, work is authorised through a building warrant granted by the local authority as verifier, with a completion certificate at the end and technical handbooks in place of approved documents. In Northern Ireland the Department of Finance makes the building regulations and district councils enforce them. Approved Document P itself is for use in England, so do not quote its paragraph numbers at a Scottish verifier.

A consumer unit replacement produces paperwork, and the paperwork is most of what you have bought. It is also what a buyer's solicitor, a letting agent or an insurer will ask for later, so treat it as part of the job rather than an afterthought, and chase it if it does not arrive.

A board that is warm to the touch, discoloured around a device, buzzing steadily or giving off a smell of hot plastic is not a job to schedule for next month. Switch off at the main switch if it is safe to reach, stop using the circuit involved, and get an electrician to look at it. Do not remove the cover, and do not replace a device yourself to see whether that fixes it.

Repeated tripping is a different signal and deserves better than a repeatedly reset switch. A device that trips is doing its job, and the useful information is the pattern: which device, which appliances were running, whether it happens in wet weather, whether it started after other work in the house. Write that down before the visit, because it shortens the diagnosis considerably. A device that will not reset at all, or one that does not trip when its test button is pressed, is a fault to report rather than a quirk to live with.