Old fuse boards were built for a house with a kettle and a telly. If yours still has fuse wire in it, it is protecting a modern home with equipment from another era.
Talk to us about your boardAny one of these is worth having looked at. A smell of burning is worth ringing about today, not next week.
A fuse protects the cable. It blows when too much current flows, which stops a wire overheating inside a wall. That is worth having, and it is all an old board does.
An RCD protects the person. It watches for current leaking to earth, which is what happens when somebody touches a live part or cuts through a cable in the garden, and it cuts the power in well under a tenth of a second. A fuse will not save you from that. An RCD will.
That is the real difference between a fuse board and a modern consumer unit, and it is why a board with no RCD is the thing we most often recommend dealing with first.
This is the part people are not usually told. A modern board is better at detecting faults than the one it replaces, so if the cable behind it is failing, the new board does its job and keeps tripping. The board is not faulty. It has found something that was always there.
So we test before we swap. If the circuits are sound, a board upgrade is the right answer and we will say so. If they are not, you will see the evidence rather than take our word for it. The Full Electrical Survey and Report is €700 for a standard house and tells you which of the two you are dealing with.
What the survey coversEasiest thing you can do. One photo of the inside of the board tells us most of what we need to know, and you get a straight answer without anyone calling out.
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