Cost guide
How much does fault finding cost?
Diagnosis is charged at £60 to £110 an hour with a minimum of one hour, and two thirds of domestic faults are traced within it. Repair is quoted once the fault is known, because until then nobody can price it honestly.
Typical prices
Ranges, not quotes. A quote depends on your room.
| Work | Typical UK price |
|---|---|
| First hour, diagnosis | £60 to £110 |
| Each additional hour | £45 to £90 |
| Fault found and repaired in one visit | £90 to £250 |
| Break in a ring final circuit, traced and repaired | £150 to £400 |
| Cable damaged under a floor, lifted and repaired | £200 to £550 |
| Logger left on site for a week | £120 to £250 |
Do the split test before you call. Unplug the circuit, reset, add items back one at a time. It takes twenty minutes of waiting and it either finds the fault or narrows the search to the wiring, and either result is worth an hour of somebody's rate.
What moves the price
- Whether the fault is present when the electrician arrives, which decides whether it can be measured or only waited for.
- How much of the circuit is accessible without lifting floors or taking down ceilings.
- Whether a circuit chart exists, or every circuit has to be identified first.
- How many appliances are on the circuit, and whether they have already been eliminated.
- Intermittent behaviour, which sometimes needs a logger left on site.
- Whether the repair follows straight on from the diagnosis in the same visit.
Who quotes for it
128 of the 133 electricians listed on this site take on fault finding.
Most of them in one place: Leeds (9), Birmingham (9), Glasgow (9), Liverpool (9), Edinburgh (9).
Questions about fault finding
Can I just replace the breaker that keeps tripping?
Fitting a larger device to stop a trip removes the protection and leaves the fault. A breaker occasionally does fail and it is the last thing to suspect, not the first.
Why is an intermittent fault so expensive?
Because it cannot be reproduced on demand. Time is spent waiting rather than testing. A logger left connected for a week records when the trip happens and what the supply was doing at the time, and it is usually cheaper than a second and third visit.