Is load now the new frontier in electrical engineering?

With the ever-increasing demands on our antiquated infrastructure now being demanded by EV installations heat pumps and so many other electrical devices, we can no longer afford to not consider the massive impact this is having on our existing Electrical systems.

Electrical design is primarily overlooked in the domestic market and not considered by nearly 90% of any electricians I have ever spoken to in this field.

I had a conversation with a company this week who have got themselves into trouble as they have no design calculations for work carried out, and they are now expecting me to get them out of trouble they haven’t factored the cost into their estimates because they have never considered it!?

Almost the first word out of their mouths was can you do it for less!

Not, can you make sure that we have the design right, to ensure that it was done correctly, and the customer is safe?

It's even overlooked in many commercial installations as well!? Often due to value engineering, the project, just to get it to survive, and then they wonder why the company goes under!

Many electricians understand single-phase systems, I cut my teeth on them, however faced with certain issues they often cannot diagnose or even find what is causing them because they were never taught properly to look outside the box, and with our ever-increasing complexity of what is attached to our homes let alone a commercial premises design and safety should be at the forefront!

There are so many good decent electricians out there, trying their best to carry out work to a safe standard unfortunately they don’t get seen in the Pacific Ocean swell of cheap Cowboys who have now infected our market driving prices down to very dangerous levels, just to survive to meet the ridiculous going rates in the industry! Or what has been written over search engines, people believe the media and will ignore sound engineering advice because all they see is the price! not safety, it is often their least thought-about concern, when it should be there 1st!

This is a failing in our current teaching of plug-and-play electricians over the decades, brought about by the demand for cheaper and cheaper installation work by in my opinion incompetent people with pieces of paper and no understanding/competency of the actual systems they are working on, that’s not to say they won’t improve but that takes time understanding, competency and the willingness to improve and learn, I’m still learning five decades later, every day’s a learning day.

They are ill-equipped to deal with three-phase systems, harmonics, and load balancing, with no understanding of heat dissipation within fuse boards or how to design fuse boards to allow for this to happen, therefore you get the smallest board (often due to cost) with no spare capacity and all the large loads sitting next door to each other, which have a detrimental effect upon the installation and can lead to failure.

The requirement for the system to be able to shut off EV chargers remotely over the Internet at a time of increased load should have very clearly raised massive alarm bells within the industry, if not the country, but as always it has been glossed over by the media like the issue does not exist.

Many engineers have voiced their opinions and then been ignored, yet systems are breaking down due to overload, age and due to the demand now being imposed on them, that they were never designed for.

The headlong race to get everything at the cheapest price and to get the cheapest labour possible by dumbing down the industry to the levels of incompetence that now exist, is now a disaster and a case of when! it is no longer if? the system will fall over, it already has in many places around the country and then has to be repaired until the next weakest link blows up.

This headlong race to force so much additional load onto an ageing infrastructure that has been starved of investment and picked clean by dividends rather than reinvestment into its infrastructure is just a disaster waiting to happen in my personal opinion and experience, I was talking about this in the 80's 40 years later it's still being hidden under the carpet.

I also wonder why nobody has even thought about the fact that once everyone is forced down the route of using electricity in a marketplace that has been overcharging in my personal opinion for this vital infrastructure for a very long time, what anybody is going to do once they are held to ransom by the energy companies because nothing is going to work without it, we are already 80% of the way there in my opinion just a thought! "think about it"!

Now don’t get me wrong, I earn money from the installation of EV chargers however I will not install an EV charger unless it is safe to do so, and we have designed the system or systems necessary to ensure that everybody remains safe, and this includes load assessing.

We have in the past week turned down 4 EV installation jobs as they were not safe to do two of these where the customer required us to install a second EV charger onto a system that was just not capable of delivering the load and 2 where the supply into the property is far too small and needs to be upgraded, again something that we are not allowed to do, it has to be done by the DNO’s yet on all of these occasions the customers got angry with us for trying to make sure they were safe and protected, people’s mindsets desperately need to change.

Your electrical supply is not a never-ending bottomless pit, it has a limit and conscientious contractors will tell you this, you also need to understand you don’t own the supply cable and like many a conversation I’ve had with domestic and building managers who think they can just add whatever they want without consequence, after all, it's their building or home!

There are far too many unscrupulous contractors out there in my personal opinion that do not care as long as the customer pays unfortunately, they outweigh the good contractors.

The customer only sees price, as an industry we need to massively re-educate the public and the commercial sector that safety is far more important, and systems need to have a proven design with all the protections required to ensure a system is safe before any implementation is carried out.

I have had a strapline for my company since the late 70s, “Safety first, last, and always” this in my opinion should be the overriding factor in any installation.

Let me make it clear I’m not saying we need a Formula One car with a mini will do and still be safe but I am saying we need to seriously sort out how we think about electrical engineering and the safety of the public in general and we have a duty of care to ensure that what we do is safe, every time.