Electrical work and repairs in Ongar

What is different about an overhead electricity supply?

Much of CM5 lies outside the town, and many homes down its lanes are fed from a pole rather than from a cable in the ground. The overhead line drops to a bracket on the house and runs to a cut-out, the box holding the main fuse, which often sits in a porch, a garage or an outbuilding rather than the hall. Everything up to and including that fuse belongs to the network operator; the meter belongs to your supplier; the tails, the consumer unit and the rest are yours. An electrician cannot touch the overhead line or the cut-out, so damage there, a tree on the line or a cable hanging low is a call to 105, not an enquiry here.

Overhead supplies carry two other consequences. They are more exposed to storms, so rural homes around Ongar lose power more often than a town street, and anyone who depends on electricity for medical equipment or heating can ask the network operator and their supplier to be added to the Priority Services Register. And voltage can dip at the end of a long line, which shows up as lights that dim when a neighbour's pump starts; the network operator can investigate that too.

Why does earthing matter more in the country?

In many rural properties the network does not provide an earth, and the house relies on an earth rod driven into the ground, an arrangement known as a TT system. With a rod, the resistance to earth is far higher than in a town, so an ordinary circuit breaker cannot be relied on to clear a fault and RCD protection on every circuit is what keeps the house safe. An old cottage with a rod that has corroded, a board with no RCDs and metal pipes bonded long ago is a combination that needs an inspection before anything else. If you do not know whether your home has a rod, look for a green and yellow cable disappearing into the ground near the meter, and tell the electrician either way.

What about the old houses in Chipping Ongar?

The high street and the roads around it hold timber-framed houses, Georgian fronts, former inns and cottages, a large number of them listed and all of them within the conservation area. Their wiring has usually been added to over generations, following whatever route was easiest at the time: through a beam here, under a floor there, surface-clipped along a cornice. The jobs that come up are inspection reports before a sale, replacement boards, careful rewires planned with the conservation officer, and fault finding in circuits that wander through three centuries of fabric. Cutting into original timber, plaster or floors in a listed building can need listed building consent from Epping Forest District Council, and an electrician used to old buildings will plan routes to avoid it.

What do farmhouses, barns and outbuildings need?

Rural homes in High Ongar, Fyfield, Moreton, Stanford Rivers and the hamlets between come with outbuildings, and power is wanted in most of them: a workshop, a stable block with lights and a water heater, a barn converted to a home office, a well or borehole pump, a sewage treatment plant with its own pump, electric fencing and gates on a long drive. Each building normally gets its own circuit from the house in armoured cable, with a small consumer unit and its own RCD protection, and each of those is a new circuit that must be notified under Part P. Older farm wiring is often a mix of eras put in by whoever was there at the time, with overhead spans between buildings that are now past their best, so an inspection of the whole holding is a sensible first step before adding anything.

Homes off the gas grid here rely on oil, LPG or electricity for heating, so immersion heaters, storage heaters and, increasingly, heat pumps all lean on the electrical installation. Say what heats the house when you enquire.

Does the postcode cover more than the town?

CM5 takes in Chipping Ongar and High Ongar and runs out across the surrounding parishes. If your village is not named here but your postcode starts CM5, the enquiry works in the same way.

What helps with an Ongar enquiry?

Say whether your supply is overhead or underground, whether the house has an earth rod, how old it is and whether it is listed, and which outbuildings need power. Photos of the consumer unit, the cut-out and the meter position are worth more than a long description. With your consent, one local electrician who covers CM5, if there is one, receives the enquiry. If nobody does, we tell you and your details are not shared.