Thanks in anticipation!
I am not looking for anyone to incriminate themselves, but can any of you advise whether it is legal to do minor electrical work at home without having it signed off by an electrician. I am looking to add a couple of branches to the ring main for additional sockets.
To the best of my knowledge it is Illegal. An electrician is required.
Same in England. If you wish to replace defective wiring for lights it's ok but new wiring no.
The wiring will have a safety cert valid for 20 years.
There are no ring mains in CH, the plugs are not fused so it would be too dangerous.
Fair enough, hadn't looked yet at the wiring. Might just do all the conduit etc myself and get the sparky in to wire it up... Cheers.
I am sure he loves customers like you.
He'll definitely love him as a customer, customer does half the work and he still charges full price for a job that takes half the time
There is no ring main here, that's a UK thing.
You can always run extension cables, as I did in my kitchen (unused 16A/3p circuit now supplying three 16A outlets).
I just went to the local electrical supplier and bought 5m of 16A/3p wire, a 3p plug, and 3 1p sockets.
Tom
Done that, basically because I wanted to manage the conduit run.
Done that too
I give not a s--t! I'm fed up having experienced many supposedly highly "educated" Swiss tradesmen citing their quality work only to get a lot of junk. Still looking for that "Swiss quality", found the high prices easy enough though.
It is not illegal to do it yourself at least not in Vaud. But you will then need to have someone in to certify the work was done properly. That's what we did and we bought out house from an electrician. It was one of his colleagues who certified the work. Well, after they told us what we had done wrong.
If you don't have it certified and then there is a fire and the fire was due to faulty wiring, your insurance will not pay.
I suspect you won't have a fire due to 'faulty wiring', if anything is wrong the fuse / circuit breaker will go. A fire is far more likely to be from an electrical appliance, Laptops with lithium ion batteries being rather nasty when they burn!
And consider the house is made of concrete I don't think the whole thing will burn down. But if you do have an electrical fire, you don't want to be without your certificate. Getting the certificate is certainly less expensive than having all the work done.
Although it has been suggested to me that it could cost more to fix what gets messed up as opposed to having it done right the in the first place.
CH doesn't have ring mains as others have said, so that's easy. If you want to hard wire it from a socket then nope, a qualified Swissy electro has to do the sign off.
If you want to make a long cable with a plug on one end plugged it into the existing socket, and fit a surface mounted socket where you want at the other end, all nicely trunked in then no, as it is effectively an extension lead and you have not changed any of the certified wiring.
Unfortunately there are companies who do not provide the service expected. This has been my experience with a carpentry firm. It took months to put the problem right. Lesson learned.
However, I have to say that my experience with electricians locally, and we have had quite a bit of work done by several firms has been very positive. Electricians are one of highest paid tradespersons, but if you use a firm where they have apprentices, if they can send one to do some of the work you can save a bit. A fully licensed electrician must supervise and check the work.
It also helps to have the electrical plans for your house.
Careful with that too; this is also subject to many regulations - such as the particular type of conduit to be used, depending if it is mounted on the surface, embedded in concrete, embedded in flammable material, and so on. There are many different types of conduit (you may have seen the famous orange conduit, which is only for installation in non-flammable materials, and only a maximum of 10cm is allowed to be exposed)
Generally, these days, the type used is KRFWG (the blue ribbed conduit), that you can generally install anywhere (and also buy anywhere). KIR is the solid plastic conduit used for surface mounting. Some of the flexible conduit even come with a draw-wire; which I've never really used, as it makes the conduit difficult to cut (it's like piano wire). Even the conduit itself is springy - a few times the free end has violently introduced itself to my face, with a preference for eyes...
Finally, there are limits on how many single cables can be inserted into a conduit - M20 diameter can have 7 if it is buried, 9 if mounted on the surface. And so on. These are for 1,5mm2 cables.
If you're interested, there is a funky little app available for the iPhone called 'Elektro-Memory' It's free, and has a load of useful (i.e. Swiss related) electrical information in it.
To the other comments:
No, there is no ring main here; it's all star/radial topology.
Do not take a 16A three-phase extension lead from you kitchen - likely it is not protected with an RCD!
And do not install an extension lead in a permament manner (within conduit, trunking, etc. An inspector will view this as a "permanent, fixed" installation, for which the cable is not approved = fail!
Cheers,
Chris
the following picture/overview gives you an idea of what you are allowed to do and what you aren't:
http://www.kontrollbuero.ch/selfmade/selfmade.htm
Essentially, you are only allowed to install lights and the corresponding light switches.
Not true (in England). It simply need to be performed by 'a competent person'. No qualification or certification is required for a DIY effort.
None of the circuits in our place are.
Tom
And here is why a little knowledge if dangerous!
The work we did was in fact, adding sockets and switches, wiring lamps and taking out a connection for a cooker. Although the OP did say "minor work" and I consider that "minor work".
But the truth is I don't know what "adding branches to a ring whatever" actually is....
actually, there was a law change a few years ago which required certain work to be certified by an electrician (part p). a bit annoying.