Part of the problem is that, unless you are an electrician dealing with electricity on a daily basis, you don’t even think about it. When it starts to get dark you simply press a switch on the wall and the lights come on. Or you have a table lamp, and again you push a switch.

When it gets cold, you may just switch on a wall heater. Or you may have electric central heating, which again requires you to press a switch or turn a control knob. If you want to cook dinner, you may well have an electric cooker, and much the same applies, except that you can control the temperature of the hob or the oven by turning the knob to a higher or lower setting.

This is everyday stuff. There is not one of us who stops to think how this power gets to us, or how it flows around the home or the office, because that all happens behind the scenes. Certainly, there is electric wiring hidden in the walls and ceilings, but it is just that: hidden.

Put your hands up everyone who knows that electrical wiring suffers from wear and tear!

Yes, it actually deteriorates over time. The process is quite slow, but it does actually wear out. When it wears out, it can become dangerous. This is one reason why, if you are an employer, you need to have a regular electrical condition report – actually called an EICR, an Electrical Installation Condition Report.

Here’s a surprise. If you run an industrial business, you should get an EICR every three years. Any other sort of commercial premises should be tested every five years, and domestic premises every ten years. A heated swimming pool should be tested annually. All premises should be tested every time there is a change of occupancy.

The laws that oversee electricity are the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, among others. What these require you to do as an employer is to look after the safety of your employees. That means, among many other things, ensuring that your electrical items are safe to use, and that the wiring in your premises is safe. However, although the laws require that, they don’t tell you how to do it or who should inspect your wiring, your electrical products, and so on. They just tell you that you have a responsibility to ensure that they are safe.

Unless you are an electrician yourself, how can you do that? Even a lot of electricians can’t do it, as it takes training and qualifications, and in the case of an electrical condition report several years of experience, in order to know exactly what to look for.

It is claimed that it is possible to do basic checks on your installation yourself, using a socket tester. This is a gadget that you can plug into a socket which will show you if there is a wiring fault. However, the problem with these is that there are quite a number of socket testers that actually can’t detect certain faults and they could give you a positive reading when in fact the wiring is faulty! So you don’t want to rely on one of those. If it gives you a reading that the wiring is faulty that’s fair enough, but a positive reading could be wrong.

The same thing applies when it comes to electricity: you need a qualified electrical engineer.