With their current cavalier attitude to “Electrical Safety” for their customers, and their employees as well.
In the current economic climate, as you would expect
large and small organisations alike are seeking to get as much as possible for as
little as possible, in many instances this is good common-sense which should have
been practised by all organisations for many years.
However, when it comes to electrical safety, cheap
is definitely not always better, with the current stranglehold with many large
FM companies, on the electrical testing market for large organisations, many
vital things are being missed, but as long as they get there piece of paper. They
don't care?
Many testing companies out there promise the earth
and deliver a farthing, yes all that will show my age.
I was sitting in the offices of a large
organisation. Not long ago providing technical breakdown of their electrical
report, when I was actually asked to sit in on a meeting the testing contractor
who was vying for their work, without recourse to their existing test report.
He promised that they could provide a proper
certificate by only doing 10% sample testing and this is perfectly legal.
However, they would be charging a small admin fee for writing up each of the
circuits that they didn't test on the surface. To the uninitiated this is a
wonderful deal.
To say I got grilled over this was an
understatement, no point me even considering trying to justify my point of
view, just referred them to the NICEIC the ECA and NAPIT, and told them to
phone their technical desk and check what this other company had said, to say I
was appalled was an understatement.
So were the above organizations, according to the client, who then invited me back to do the work, yes there are some sensible clients out there!
So let me explain, the rules, you can only do sample
testing, if you have full results for every circuit on every fuse-board from
your previous test report, had they bothered to check this No, did they asked for
a copy of the report prior to provide a price No, so had they, accepted the
cost and engaged them they would have a piece of paper that wasn't worth the
paper it's printed on , in fact the client would have been in breach of their legally
duty of care to ensure safe testing practices and the employment of a competent
contractor.
Oh, did I forget! under the new legislation. It is
the client's responsibility to ensure that the contractor they employ does the
job properly! And they can go to prison if they don't?
Unfortunately, like most commercial enterprises from
shops, factories to office space.
Their main consideration is only money and the least
inconvenience!
This unfortunate cavalier attitude that has been
prevalent for the past 25 years in our industry has led to more and more
companies that provide a cheap price using every loophole in the book as long
as they don't get caught, that is, just to get the work.
The amount of buildings I go into, that are
supposedly covered by current test certificates, where I personally would like
to physically turn them off because of the dangers I see are now fast
outweighing the good ones, due to years of neglect and worthless test and
reports.
Time and time again I see reports which are
basically worthless pieces of paper supplied to the customer from FM companies
and cheap do it at any cost testing contractors, who put in a cheap price just
to get remedial works, and in over 60% of the cases I have seen personally
prices that are less than half the actual cost of doing the work; but the
remedial costs are twice the amount, so the clients think, they are getting a
good job, and a very cheap price and then pay through the nose at the end.
The misconception from estate agents that they can
get five if not six EICR reports done per day by their engineers at £45 each is
an illusion, pure economics state that by the time you've driven to a job with 1
man or two men done the inspection work on site at least another hour minimum if
you're lucky, if they bother to inspected properly and then driven back, produced paperwork
your total time spent on the job, For two men is approximately 8 hours.
Pure maths equates to £5.62 p and hour, a decent electrician will cost
somewhere between £13 and £15 per hour and a properly qualified time served
engineer who understands the requirements of inspection can cost anywhere between £15
and £25 an hour, (More knowledge is needed for more complex systems), not hard to work out the type of report you'll get!
How long is it going to take, I hear so often well,
I don't know, can you tell me what's wrong with the system or what's right with
the system, I don't know! But you must know! You do this all the time!
Well some of them take 10 min others can take an
hour, totally depends on what I find.
How many more lives will be put at risk, where money
is the ultimate aim along with inconvenience!
For me personally, one life is too many,
unfortunately statistics show hundreds of lives are lost every year to
electrocution, and in most cases these lives could have been saved if it had
been Inspected / Maintained properly.
But the work has been carried out properly, we used Fred the
painter to install the electrical systems, he said he know how! or labourers being used to do electrical work
and many items missed because the client does not want to pay the true price,
of doing it properly! So the cheap contractor cuts corners in order to get the job at any cost.
Time and time again, I have lost work personally and
know many other people within the industry that have lost work, because their
quote, /estimates were too high.
Yet when the other cheap contractor who won the job,
gets to site to carry out the work he finds a number of items that need to be
done that were not quoted for by him, yet under close inspection were quoted for
by the other apparently expensive contractors.
Yet I'm called back six months, to two years later
to fix the problems that they've got the other contractor in to fix on a number
of occasions and paid nearly double the price in the end, to have the work put
right.
It is time that this country wakes up and realises
that incompetence and cheap contractors do not save you money, they in fact cost
you double the amount in the end.
If you look at it properly and get your FDs
to investigate the real cost when you're contractor has to come back multiple
times for quote, “Apparently additional
works." That you’re only actually paying for what should have been done
right in the first place?
For
Further information call 0800-542-0638
Or
contact us via our website: - www.safe-electric.com
