UK Is an SPD required for a loft conversion?

[ionionascu]

Hi. We live in an older house and we are doing a loft conversion. We do not have an SPD on the connection to the grid and the builder's electricians insist that we must have one, otherwise he can't sign the certificate, but he doesn't want to give me a reason. We have a few consumer units under the stairs, next to the meter and I do not think there is enough space for him to do any changes now. I want to have an SPD installed, but not right now as we plan to do some other changes in the house soon and I do not think it is worth paying for something now just to have it changed in a few months. Can someone please tell me whether there is a legal requirement to install an SPD when doing a loft conversion? (the house is a semi-detached with a looped connection and the electrician didn't even have to connect a new loop to the consumer unit as this had alreay been done a few years ago when we had some other electrical work done in the house). Thank you

 

[Markyd]

Say I have an SPD fitted at a cost of £250, then there is a thunderstorm nearby and then my £500 2 year and 1 day TV goes faulty, whats the procedure for getting a working TV again?

Buy One

 

[Mike Johnson]

Buy One

And while your at it a new SPD as well.

 

[pc1966]

I'm guessing someone pokes their head in that room on a regular basis.

In our case yes, one of the reasons I like the Hager boards with the transparent door!

Imagine high value processes being protected by an SPD which remains locked away in a switch room where no one might check its status for weeks on end. Power won't ever be interrupted, but SPD could be taken out today and equipment by a later surge and no one would understand what went wrong. Everything in buildings monitored to within an inch of its existence, yet this fairly critical piece of kit gets overlooked. The odds of two surges are probably remote, but linking surge protection back to BMS would be a relatively trivial cost.

It should be a more common thing to do.

Even in our case we do have a monitoring system based on Nagios software that emails us on issues, even sending a SMS if it gets really worries about some things, but so far I have not got round to putting in a safely isolated route from the DB's mains operated LED to the computer network to allow automation.

 

[mainline]

Buy One

Tell them it went wrong 3 days before it did

 

[Mike Johnson]

Tell them it went wrong 3 days before it did

Tut Tut, that's dishonest.