Periodic Electrical Installation Inspection – How Often? 

By on

periodicInspectionsInspection of electrical installations on a periodic basis is essential to ensure the continued safety and reliability of such installations.

How often installations are inspected is up to the owner of the installation, provided such durations do not exceed any regulatory maximums in force. The criticality of the electrical installation to the continuation of the business, often determines how frequently the installation is inspected, for example many banks will carry out annual inspections of their installations. Other types of enterprise may do inspections more frequently and many installations are only inspected as often as required by regulation.

It is also possible, that different parts of an electrical installation are inspected with varying periods. Critical systems may be inspected more often than non-critical systems.

Depending where you live, it is likely that electrical installation regulations will exist, which will state the maximum duration allowable between inspections. For example in the IEE Wiring Regulations in the UK and the National Electric Code in the US, both deal how long an installation can be left without being inspected.

As an example in the UK, IEE Guidance Note 3, Inspection & Testing contains a table which gives the maximum allowable periods between inspections - offices, residential accommodation five years, leisure complexes, theatres three years, marinas, swimming pools one year, … , etc.

Now that the when has been covered, my second post will look at what should be inspected:

Periodic Electrical Installation Inspection – What to Inspect?



Steven McFadyen's avatar Steven McFadyen

Steven has over twenty five years experience working on some of the largest construction projects. He has a deep technical understanding of electrical engineering and is keen to share this knowledge. About the author

myElectrical Engineering

comments powered by Disqus

  1. Eurotechworld's avatar Eurotechworld says:
    6/7/2012 7:11 PM

    It is wonderful information and very helpful in business. Thanks for shearing this topic friend.

    Third Party Inspection


Comments are closed for this post:
  • have a question or need help, please use our Questions Section
  • spotted an error or have additional info that you think should be in this post, feel free to Contact Us



Generator Sizing & Operation Limits

When selecting a generator, there are inherent limits on the active and reactive power which can be delivered. Generators are normally sized for a certain...

Multimeter

Multimeters are undoubtedly the most common item of electrical test equipment in use.  Often it is the first piece of equipment people will turn to when...

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare, makes the materials used in teaching all MIT subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world.

Why use catalogues

I'm a fan of using manufacturers catalogues. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, if your involved in the purchase of equipment, you will likely...

Arc Flash Calculations

Working in the vicinity of electrical equipment poses an hazard. In addition to electric shock hazard, fault currents passing through air causes Arc Flash...

Frame Leakage Protection

While not as popular as it once was, frame leakage protection does still have some use in some circumstances.  In essence frame leakage is an earth fault...

Useful Motor Technical Information

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to quickly lookup a piece of technical information.  This note is a collection of information related to motors, and in...

Differential protection, the good old days

This morning I was explaining how differential protection works to a junior engineer. To give him something to read I opened up the NPAG (Network Protection...

What is an Open Delta Transformer

In three phase systems, the use of transformers with three windings (or legs) per side is common.  These three windings are often connected in delta or...

HTML Symbol Entities

HTML supports a variety of entity symbols which can be entered using either numbers or an entity name.  The number or name is preceded by the ‘&’ sign...

Have some knowledge to share

If you have some expert knowledge or experience, why not consider sharing this with our community.  

By writing an electrical note, you will be educating our users and at the same time promoting your expertise within the engineering community.

To get started and understand our policy, you can read our How to Write an Electrical Note