Electricians in Stoke-on-Trent

Every rented property in England needs an Electrical Installation Condition Report at least every five years, and at the start of a new tenancy if the existing one has run out. It is a legal requirement, not a recommendation, and the penalties for not having one are considerably more expensive than the report.

With Staffordshire University and Keele on the doorstep, a large share of the housing in Shelton, Hartshill, Penkhull and around Newcastle-under-Lyme turns over on the same few weeks each summer. That is a narrow window, and a report that comes back with remedial work in it can wreck a move-in date.

So we do two things differently. We book landlord work around the changeover rather than into it, and where a report throws up C1 or C2 items we quote them there and then instead of leaving you to find another electrician mid-void.

A large part of the housing stock in Burslem, Tunstall, Longton and Fenton predates the war, and plenty of it has never been fully rewired — just added to. What we find behind the plaster is usually a mix: a modern kitchen circuit, an eighties ring main, and somewhere in the middle a length of rubber or fabric-sheathed cable from the original installation that has gone brittle.

Boards tell the same story. We regularly open up a rewireable fuse box with no RCD protection at all, or a split-load unit from the nineties that has run out of ways and been extended with a spur nobody documented. Neither is automatically dangerous, but neither will pass an inspection either.

Solid walls change the job too. In a terrace with no cavity there is nowhere to hide a cable, so runs have to be chased into brick and made good afterwards. That is part of the reason a rewire in an older Stoke property takes longer than the same job on a newer estate — and why we plaster and make good as part of the price rather than leaving you with a decorator to find.

Because the electrics sit inside a renovation team, the timing works differently as well. On a kitchen or bathroom job the first fix happens the moment the walls are open, not three weeks later when a separate contractor can fit you in.

Newer properties at Trentham, Barlaston and Blurton are usually sound — there the work is adding capacity: EV chargers, garden power, better lighting.

What does electrical work cost?

Rewires are priced on the number of circuits and points rather than floor area, and older properties cost more because of the chasing and making good.

Everything below includes testing, certification and notification.