Electrical Fire Safety Week 2019: 18th - 24th November.

I don’t do domestic work but I acknowledge that often electricians are well placed to offer advice on fire safety issues. They get into the bowels of buildings where breaches in compartmentation can go un-noticed. How many times have I pushed up a suspended ceiling tile to see a 15mm water pipe go through a hole in a wall as big as the Mersey Tunnel or builders who have left walls short of the underside of the structural floor along designated escape rotes. In one relatively new Council Civic  building, fire dampers on the ventilation system were not secured with some of them set back from the wall by so much as to be utterly useless. I am a member of the Institute of Fire Prevention Officers and thus have no qualms about passing this information on to clients even though my role is often confined solely to electrical inspection issues.

It might be that sparks feel that it is really none of their business what other trades do and feel no obligation to point out fire safety discrepancies. That’s probably because we really dont do joined-up construction in the UK. We are too focused on our own wee bit. 

With respect to passing information to clients, well that’s about all you can do, you can’t insist that they act upon it. The relatively new Council building referred to earlier actually provides, amongst other things, office accommodation to a Building Control authority. Having carried out the inspection of the original electrical installation, set out in a written communication all the observed fire safety issues and having carried out the subsequent five-yearly inspection, not one damned thing was attended to! So again I referred to the same issues on my EICR but because they were non-electrical, the client asked me to remove them.

So Lisa, in terms of your question about relaying information, unless it is tied to a brick and chucked through their window, many clients would prefer that we should just mind our own business!

I don’t do domestic work but I acknowledge that often electricians are well placed to offer advice on fire safety issues. They get into the bowels of buildings where breaches in compartmentation can go un-noticed. How many times have I pushed up a suspended ceiling tile to see a 15mm water pipe go through a hole in a wall as big as the Mersey Tunnel or builders who have left walls short of the underside of the structural floor along designated escape rotes. In one relatively new Council Civic  building, fire dampers on the ventilation system were not secured with some of them set back from the wall by so much as to be utterly useless. I am a member of the Institute of Fire Prevention Officers and thus have no qualms about passing this information on to clients even though my role is often confined solely to electrical inspection issues.

It might be that sparks feel that it is really none of their business what other trades do and feel no obligation to point out fire safety discrepancies. That’s probably because we really dont do joined-up construction in the UK. We are too focused on our own wee bit. 

With respect to passing information to clients, well that’s about all you can do, you can’t insist that they act upon it. The relatively new Council building referred to earlier actually provides, amongst other things, office accommodation to a Building Control authority. Having carried out the inspection of the original electrical installation, set out in a written communication all the observed fire safety issues and having carried out the subsequent five-yearly inspection, not one damned thing was attended to! So again I referred to the same issues on my EICR but because they were non-electrical, the client asked me to remove them.

So Lisa, in terms of your question about relaying information, unless it is tied to a brick and chucked through their window, many clients would prefer that we should just mind our own business!