Your Electrical Inspection - why it's important and what to expect
Every 5 years we’ll check the electrics in your home.
We’re legally required to do this, to make sure that your home is safe so it’s important that you let us in. From May 2026, it’s also a legal requirement for us to give you a copy of the report that proves that we’ve inspected, tested and checked your electrical installations within 28 days of the inspection.
Why do my electrics need to be checked?
Even with normal, careful, everyday use electrical equipment and installations won’t last forever.
Over time, wear and tear will be inevitable which could lead to something breaking and/or becoming dangerous.
The trouble is, much of a home’s electrical system is hidden away in walls or shut in cupboards or enclosures. And, even where parts of an electrical installation are visible and accessible, it’s not always possible to know when a fault has developed.
That’s why it’s so important to have the installation in your home regularly checked through an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), ensuring everything’s in good working order and keeping everyone safe.
What is an electrical installation?
An electrical installation includes the system of wires, switches, socket-outlets and lighting that brings electricity from the main supply into your house and makes it usable. This includes:
- wires and cabling inside your walls, under your floors and above your ceilings
- consumer units or fuse boxes
- light fittings, switches and socket-outlets
- fixed electrical equipment such as showers
- protective devices including circuit breakers and RCDs (residual current devices).
Items that you plug into your socket-outlets (think, hairdryers, fridges, or TVs) are not considered part of the electrical installations – they’re appliances. These won’t be checked as part of the EICR.
What is an EICR?
Also referred to as an electrical safety check, an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) is a document produced by an electrical inspector following a comprehensive health check of your home’s electrical installation. You might also have heard of it referred to as ‘fixed wire testing’ or ‘periodic inspection and testing’.
An EICR will identify signs of age, wear and tear, and damage, ensuring your home’s electrical installation is safe to use and that you’re not at risk of fires or electric shocks resulting from faults in the electrical installation.
What does an electrical safety check involve?
When doing the EICR, your electrical inspector will move through a four-step process:
- Visual inspection
The first step is a visual inspection to spot obvious signs of damage or poor installation quality, including:
- cracks or wear and tear in socket-outlets or switches
- signs of overheating or burning
- outdated or damaged consumer units/fuse boards
- missing or broken equipment and enclosure covers
- incorrect labelling of circuits
- DIY alterations that may not meet regulations.
- Testing of circuits
Using a range of specialist equipment, your electrical inspector will isolate parts of your installation and perform a defined range of tests on the wiring around the home.
This includes:
- Continuity testing: to check all wires are properly connected with no unintended breaks.
- Insulation resistance testing: to ensure all wires are properly insulated and there’s no risk of the insulation breaking down, resulting in potential faults or electric shock risks.
- Polarity testing: to confirm that live and neutral wires are correctly connected and that the circuit protective devices are correctly installed.
- Earth fault loop impedance testing: to verify that, if a fault occurs, the system will trip quickly to safely cut off the supply.
- RCD testing: to ensure that RCDs function as intended and that they trip quickly enough to avoid electric shock.
- Recording the results
If any faults or issues are found, your electrician will note these down and assign each one a classification code:
- Code C1: danger present – immediate action required.
- Code C2: potentially dangerous – urgent remedial work needed.
- Code C3: improvement recommended – not dangerous but should be improved.
- FI: further investigation required.
- Issuing the report
After the inspection Curo will receive a full report on the electrical safety status of your, listing any electrical faults diagnosed, their classification code, and recommendations of how to fix them. We’ll send a copy of this report to you.
EICRs are either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. If a C1, C2 or FI code is assigned to any observed issue, this will result in an unsatisfactory outcome.
It’s important to remember that an FI classification code can be assigned to issues that are not necessarily faults. It can simply mean an unknown situation that needs further investigation to rule out a potential fault.