How much to charge for a consumer unit change

The phone goes and it is a homeowner. "How much to change a fuse box?" Most electricians answer with a number they half remember from the last one, or whatever they think the sparks down the road charges. That is how a good job turns into a long, badly paid one. Working out how much to charge for a consumer unit change starts with your hours, not with the price of the board.

How much to charge for a consumer unit change starts with your time

Customers think a board change is a morning swapping one box for another. You know it is not. It is the survey visit, the testing before you touch anything, the changeover itself, putting right whatever the testing turns up, the full test afterwards, the certificate, notifying building control, and walking the customer through what you have done.

Your times will be different, and that is the point. Write down your own for the last two or three you did, including the bits you never think of as work, like the evening you spent on the paperwork.

Turning the hours into a job price

The hour figure is a back office tool. You use it to work the price out, and the customer never hears it. What they hear is one price for the whole job.

Using £75 an hour, purely as a rough example to show the sum and not a figure to copy, ten hours is £750 of your time before you have bought a single part. Then add the board, the devices, the surge protection, any bonding cable and the sundries at the price you sell them for, not the price you paid. That total is your job price. If you have been quoting less than your labour alone, you have found where your profit has been going.

Your own hourly number comes from your own costs, and the free minimum charge calculator works it out for you in a few minutes. If you have never done it, the guide to working out your electrician hourly rate in the UK explains what goes into it and why the answer lands on a minimum charge rather than an hourly rate.

Never price a board change over the phone

Every one is different, and the differences are where the time goes. Is it a TT supply? Is the main bonding there at all? Are the meter tails long enough? Is the board in a cupboard you can actually work in? Has someone run a shed supply off the cooker circuit? You will not know until you look.

So when they ask on the phone, say something like this:

"Every board change is different, so I won't guess a price over the phone and then change it on the day. I'll come and have a look, it takes about twenty minutes, and I'll give you a fixed price in writing with everything included."

That one sentence does three jobs. It tells them you are thorough, it stops you being compared on a guess, and it gets you into the house, which is where you win the work. Whether you charge for that visit is your call, and the article on whether electricians should charge for quotes goes through the options.

The faults that turn one day into two

The biggest risk in a consumer unit change is what you find when you test. An old board with a single RCD, or none at all, has often been hiding poor insulation resistance, a borrowed neutral or a damp outside light for years. Put every circuit on RCD protection and those faults suddenly show themselves, usually at half past four with the customer's tea in the oven.

Deal with that in the quote, not on the day. Test before you price where you can. Then write two things down clearly:

• What your price includes: the board, surge protection, testing, certificate, building control notification, and bringing the main bonding up to standard if it is needed.
• What happens if the testing finds faults on existing circuits: you will stop, explain what you have found in plain English, and give them a price to put it right before you carry on.

Customers do not mind extra work they have been warned about. They mind surprises. The electrician who explained it up front looks like the expert. The one who rings with bad news halfway through looks like he is making it up.

Give them options, not a discount

Sooner or later somebody will ask, "What's your best price?" Do not take money off. The moment you knock £100 off, you have told them the first price was made up.

Add value instead. Give them two or three options on the same quote. Option one is the board change done properly. Option two adds something they will genuinely be glad of while you are there with the power off, such as interlinked smoke and heat alarms, an outside socket, or a full condition report on the rest of the installation. Most people pick the middle one, and none of it means dropping your price.

If they come back with a cheaper quote from someone else, the conversation in what to say when a customer says another electrician is cheaper works just as well for a board change as anything else.

Stop competing with the cheap board change

There is always someone who will do it for a lot less. Some of them skip the testing before they start, leave the bonding as they found it, and never get round to notifying building control. You cannot beat that on price and you should not try.

What you can do is make the comparison pointless. Tell the customer exactly what your price includes. Tell them you will test every circuit before and after. Tell them they will get the certificate and the building regulations paperwork, and explain why their home insurer or a future buyer will want to see it. Most people have never had any of that explained to them, and they remember whoever took the time to do it.

Pricing jobs like this properly, and getting in front of customers who care more about the job than the price, is a big part of what we work on together inside My Electricians ToolBox. Membership is £127, and it is currently £97 a month if you want to have a look.

So when did you last time a board change from the first phone call to the certificate, and does your price cover all of it?