What Is an EICR and Why Does It Matter?

An Electrical Installation Condition Report — an EICR — is a formal, recorded health check of everything hard-wired into a property: the consumer unit, the cables buried in your walls, the sockets, the switches and the fixed appliances wired straight into a circuit. A qualified engineer inspects it, tests it against BS 7671, and writes down exactly what they found.

It is not a visual once-over of your fuse board. It is a series of measured tests, circuit by circuit, and the numbers either pass or they do not.

What an EICR actually checks

Your engineer works outwards from the consumer unit, isolating and testing each circuit in turn. On a typical London flat that means five to eight circuits; on a larger house it can be twelve or more.

The core tests are always the same, whatever the property:

• Continuity (R1+R2) — is the protective earth path unbroken from the board to the furthest point on the circuit?
• Insulation resistance — is the insulation around your cables still doing its job, or has it degraded?
• Earth fault loop impedance (Zs) — if a fault happened right now, would the breaker clear it fast enough?
• RCD trip time — does the residual current device cut the supply within the required milliseconds?
• Polarity — is everything wired the right way round, so switches break the live conductor?

Alongside the tests, the engineer inspects for the things numbers will not reveal: damaged accessories, undersized cable, missing earth bonding to gas and water, signs of overheating at terminals, and DIY work that was never signed off.

What the report tells you

Every EICR ends in one of two words. Satisfactory means the installation is safe for continued use. Unsatisfactory means at least one thing was found that needs putting right before it can be called safe.

Anything worth noting is recorded as an observation with a code — C1, C2, C3 or FI. A single C1, C2 or FI is enough to make the whole report unsatisfactory, which is why an otherwise healthy installation can still fail on one item.

Why it actually matters

Three reasons, in the order people usually care about them.

Safety. Faults in fixed wiring are invisible until they are not. Deteriorated insulation, a loose neutral or a missing earth will not announce themselves — they simply sit there until someone touches the wrong thing or a cable gets warm enough to matter.

Compliance. If you let property, an in-date EICR is not optional. Agents will ask for it, councils can demand it, and an expired certificate at the start of a new tenancy is a problem you do not want on record.

Money. Insurers ask about electrical condition after a claim. Buyers use an unsatisfactory report as a negotiating lever. And a small C2 found now is almost always cheaper than the same fault found after it has damaged something.

How long it takes, and what it costs

Allow two to four hours for a typical flat or small house. Power goes off in stages as circuits are isolated, so it is a series of short outages rather than one long one — tell your engineer in advance if you work from home or have anything that cannot lose power.

Pricing follows circuit count, because circuit count is what drives testing time. Small installations of up to six circuits start at £75; most four- to six-bedroom homes and HMOs fall in the seven-to-twelve circuit band from £109.99. Your digital certificate follows within 24–48 hours.

Book an EICR or call 020 3386 1854 and speak to an engineer rather than a call centre.