Housebuilders: Get The Most Out Of Your Contractor

Many housebuilders work with the same electrical contractor for years without questioning why. Here’s what you should be asking your electrical contractor, whether you are building one or a thousand homes.

Site personnel, qualifications and training

Electrical contractors have specialist skills, training, and qualifications like many of the subcontractors that flow through your site. A well-organised electrical contractor of any scale will send a team including:
• Experienced fully-qualified staff who direct their team and ensure quality.
• Junior team members who are able to work competently by themselves.
• Apprentices who are learning the trade on the job by shadowing others and carrying out laboring or repetitive tasks, whilst they study towards their qualifications.
• Sub-contractors may be brought in by the electrical contractor for specialist aspects such as solar panel installation or heat pumps. These sub-contractors should have specialist qualifications for those activities.

So far so good- competent staff, active training, a straightforward chain of command, and clear responsibility.

In practice, how many times have you encountered a sub-contractors sub-contractor brought in for the day to fill a capacity gap, wandering around lost, or doing things on site that are poor quality, or dangerous to others? They may (or may not) be wearing the sub-contractors t-shirt and sat through a 30-minute health and safety site briefing, but If the electrical contractor does not have a proper system of training, briefing, and allocating sufficient resources to projects, they will inevitably suffer capacity gaps.

Junior staff then find themselves out of their depth, or the sub-contractors of sub-contractors find themselves called in last minute and thrown in at the deep end. This leads to poor quality installation, or mistakes that get hidden for convenience, which may prove costly to resolve, with potential knock-on effects for other trades and the whole project, or even worse if faults emerge after handover.

Before hiring an electrical contractor ask them about their training and human resource management, how they allocate staff to a project, and whether they can tell you who specifically will be on site for your project. You can also request staff ID to be forwarded a day or two by email before they come on to site.

If you do business with a responsible contractor who invests in their staff, you are reducing the risks on your project and encouraging better industry standards in the process.

Availability and responsiveness throughout the project

Electrical contractors want to work with you to find the perfect schedule slot, when they can send in their team to blitz the first fix (cabling and backboxes), and then later the second fix (fixtures and fittings). They will also set up the site electrics, and then decommission them at the end of the project.

But, will they be available if a problem emerges along the way? Accidents happen on site, which may include damage to the site electrics, that need to be resolved immediately to ensure safe working conditions. Most contractors will, in practice, address any situation within 24 hours, but it’s worth having it agreed in advance and written into your contract to avoid expensive site closures or any temptation for site teams to work on despite electrical faults or bodging their own repairs.

Snagging systems

Ask your electrical contractor about their snagging system. Inevitably, there will be snagging issues, through no fault of the electrical contractor, but the critical thing here is how the snags are managed.

Any snags should be registered on a system, in which each snag is assigned to a named person. The snag should be tracked, resolved, and recorded including photographic evidence, and signed off. The importance of this is that, if the client reports any faults now or later, you will be able to easily trace what items were resolved, how, and by whom. You’ll save money through easy resolution and reduce the risk of an expensive fault occurring.

But the main benefit of a formal snagging system is that it involves operatives taking personal responsibility for quality and fault resolution, and through the process of recording fault resolution, we usually avoid faults occurring in the first place, because the operative knows they will be visible and their work recorded.

Similarly, ask your builder what builders warranty and site software they use. The proper implementation of these systems will reduce costly faults, improve fault resolution and provide everyone with fair evidence should there be any post-occupancy legal issue.

How to help your electrical contractor be the best they can be

By raising these queries with your electrical contractor, you let them know that you are on the ball and that you expect the highest standards of workmanship and administration to contribute to a smooth project overall. If they don’t already have a formal snagging system, they may well raise their game to fit your requirements.

In return, you have a responsibility to provide a clear specification for what you require, and when asked for decisions regarding two lighting options, for example, you do what you can to provide a quick decision. Where either option would be fine, you quickly let the contractor know that they may proceed with either as they see fit. They may have a favoured option that is quicker and easier to install, or one product may be more readily available, but they will know about those things.

It’s really important that electrical contractors know that you are motivated by your own project and that you respect their time and their profession. Many principal contractors don’t address the needs of their subcontractors, or they aggressively challenge their pricing or other aspects of their work. If you don’t respect and look after your electrical contractors, they will prioritise better clients, either subtly or blatantly.

Conclusion

Get the most from your electrical contractor by demonstrating your own high standards, and being an excellent desirable client. Encourage them to use your project as their website showpiece. Your electrical contractor should be reviewed for every project because their capacity and personnel will likely change over time, but ideally, you form a solid working partnership and weather the storms together over the years.