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Preparing a flat for renting

Harry Macdonald
Hi all,

I would be very grateful for some advice. 

My daughter is having her Edinburgh 1st floor flat prepared for renting and it needs some work highlighted by an electrical safety report. Some things have been noted as requiring remedial work that seem odd to me:
  • Two sockets are noted as being wired in Aluminium Twin & Earth cable. Is this likely? It looks to me like stranded copper.  Would it need replacing even if it is as this would be a pig of a job as the wiring is under a laminate floor.

  • The electrician has quoted for adding rubber grommets to all socket back boxes. I know that this is good practice but is it necessary before a property can be rented.?

  • The gas meter is plastic with metal pipes in and out. It is in the ground at the front of the house. Immediately through the wall is the termination point for the DNO supply with a big earth terminal with the rising (copper) gas pipe a few inches away. The Electrician says that the incoming gas supply must be bonded to the Flat main earth point, i.e. up the stairs and across a doorway and not the the building main earth point. Is he correct?


I have a photo but I can't work out how to upload it. It says drag but that doesn't seem to work.
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    Each flat is an installation so requires bonding where the pipe work enters the flat.

    Isn't BS 7671 a bit agnostic on that point? Especially if the DNO supply arrives at a single point for the entire building. If the designer was to say that the installation covered the entire building and supplies to individual flats were just distribution circuits of the larger installation and any bonding within each flat was merely supplementary building, what regulation(s) say otherwise? Physically bonding once at the intake would be exactly what would be required if it were one large house that hadn't been subdivided into flats or were say a hotel with just the same number of rooms - so where's the actual danger if individual flats don't duplicate main bonding? These days with DNO abdicating responsibility for building networks, it's likely BS 7671 applies between the intake an individual flats anyway.


    I agree the T&E sounds more like imperial sized copper - copper conductors were originally tinned to prevent a reaction with compounds in rubber insulation, but the practice continued into the early days of PVC. A quick file on the end of a conductor should show up the copper underneath.


       - Andy.
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    Each flat is an installation so requires bonding where the pipe work enters the flat.

    Isn't BS 7671 a bit agnostic on that point? Especially if the DNO supply arrives at a single point for the entire building. If the designer was to say that the installation covered the entire building and supplies to individual flats were just distribution circuits of the larger installation and any bonding within each flat was merely supplementary building, what regulation(s) say otherwise? Physically bonding once at the intake would be exactly what would be required if it were one large house that hadn't been subdivided into flats or were say a hotel with just the same number of rooms - so where's the actual danger if individual flats don't duplicate main bonding? These days with DNO abdicating responsibility for building networks, it's likely BS 7671 applies between the intake an individual flats anyway.


    I agree the T&E sounds more like imperial sized copper - copper conductors were originally tinned to prevent a reaction with compounds in rubber insulation, but the practice continued into the early days of PVC. A quick file on the end of a conductor should show up the copper underneath.


       - Andy.
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