Electrical Repairs and Maintenance

To replace an electrical socket in your home or add a lighting circuit can be quite daunting if you don’t have experience of having done this previously. There are few areas in person’s home (or landlords property) where repairs and updates strikes more fear than electrical issues – you can see a water leak, and usually smell a gas leak, but with electrical problems it’s often only when you get an electrical shock that you realise something is wrong or perhaps when there is a fire caused by faulty wiring (which can be life-threatening and distressing).

If you require a new plug socket, or have a faulty one, or have an electrical wiring fault then give us a call. Wiring circuits can be old and redundant connected in many different ways and an existing circuit may well need added protection installing before it conforms to current wiring regulations – even a simple wiring extension can be complicated!

Originally before the ring circuit was introduced each plug had its own single fuse and if you were lucky you had 5 sockets in the whole house.  However, nowadays with the multitude of domestic appliances that are used you often need more than 5 sockets per room! It is now very common for us to be asked to replace an electrical socket or add an electrical socket.  When undetaking this work cover a wide range of areas from our base in Hale Altrincham, and other areas including Chorlton, Disbury, Northenden, Ashley, Mere, Stockport, Heaton Mersey, Gatley and many more.

With the advent of ring mains came wiring regulations, which are subject to ongoing updates and additions; these regulations are there to specify what the minimum requirements are for wiring a building and they are predominantly geared to safety.

One of the great improvements over the years has been in size earthing and bonding through out the house i.e. earthing is green and yellow conductors that connect metal pipes (gas, water or oil) from inside a building to the main earth terminal of the electrical installation. In addition to this we have had great inventions like ELCB  (circuit protection devises ) not least the latest replacing the first ELCB is the  RCCD (Residual Current Circuit  Device)  and MCB (Miniature Circuit Breakers) that are designed to disconnect a circuit on the detection of fault on the circuit before it can give a person a shock. This is not perfect protection for all circumstances (especially lighting circuits) but they are a vast improvement on the old hard wire fuses that were in use for many years.

Whilst such devices are incredibly reliable and have, without doubt, saved lots of lives and nasty injuries, they have brought a real problem in terms of nuisance tripping (where the circuit breaker trips for no apparent reason and can cause a complete circuit to go down) and this can sometimes be difficult to track down and resolve. The trip problem is caused by sudden changes in electrical load that can result in a small, brief current flow to earth, especially in old appliances. As RCDs are very sensitive and operate very quickly, they may well trip a faulty kettle. Some equipment items are notoriously `leaky’ (ie, they generate a small, constant current flow to earth) eg, some types of computer equipment, and large television sets can cause problems, even a light bulb blowing can cause a trip, and we are often called out to nuisance tripping.

Domestic property owners and landlords should not take chances with wiring – we can respond to and deal with most electrical maintenance problems eg. to replace an electrical socket is not expensive, but in needs to be done properly. Fault-finding for electrical wiring faults is a skill and relies on the use of specialist meters and knowledge, even adding a new circuit in a property comes requires that safety regulations are complied with, so don’t be tempted to maintain or repair something you are not familiar with, just give us a call – at AC Joinery we have experts available to help!