If you run premises in Andover, Salisbury, Winchester or anywhere between, three pieces of electrical paperwork come up again and again: with your insurer, with your landlord, and when a fire risk assessor or environmental health officer visits. They are the Electrical Installation Condition Report, the PAT register, and the emergency lighting logbook. None of them are complicated. Most businesses just don’t know which they need or how often.
The EICR covers the fixed wiring of the building: the distribution board, circuits, sockets, lighting and earthing. The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 require employers to keep electrical systems safe, and an EICR is how you demonstrate it. For most commercial premises the recommended interval is five years; for some environments, such as premises open to the public, hospitality and anything with a wet or hostile environment, it is shorter. If your unit is leased, check the lease: responsibility for the fixed wiring often sits with the landlord, but responsibility for using it safely always sits with you.
PAT testing covers the things with a plug: kettles, tills, computers, extension leads, fridges, tools. There is no legal requirement to test every appliance every year, whatever a sticker salesman tells you. The requirement is that equipment is maintained in a safe condition, and a risk-based approach is what the HSE expects: a laptop in an office might be checked every two to four years, a power tool on a site every three months. We set the intervals per class of equipment and give you a register that shows the logic.
Emergency lighting is required under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 wherever people might have to leave a building in the dark: that is nearly every commercial premises, plus HMOs and the communal areas of flats. BS 5266 sets out the standard. It needs a brief monthly function test, which you can do yourself with a key switch, and an annual full-duration test where the lights run for three hours on battery. Both go in a logbook. A missing or empty logbook is one of the most common findings on a fire risk assessment.
The simplest way to keep all three current is to bundle them: one visit a year covers the PAT testing and the emergency lighting duration test, with the EICR added in the year it falls due, and a monthly emergency lighting check done in-house. That is what our planned maintenance arrangement is built around. If you’d like a quote for your premises anywhere in Hampshire, Wiltshire or west Berkshire, send us the address and roughly how many appliances and fittings you have and we’ll price it without a visit.