Periodic Inspection of Office and Server Room Electrics

[thescullster]

Hi all

Hoping that someone will be able to give me chapter and verse on the subject matter.

The company that carries out minor electrical works for my employer has stated that we are due a 5 year electrical inspection. This should be relatively easy to accommodate on the general office wiring, but not so much on the server room.

The server room is fed from an independent consumer unit straight off the mains supply (which is 3 phase).

So the question is....

Does the same testing regime/5 year period apply to the electrical installation for the server room that is being recommended for the general office fixed wiring? I am thinking it may be less onerous as there will be far less plugging and unplugging of equipment/no general employee access.

If anyone can provide references on this it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

[Andy Burns]

The company that does the testing for an emergency service's server room (3 phase, genny, GBFO UPS) that I've been involved with for 20+ years only insists on inspections every 10 years, it'll be gone before the next one rolls around.

[thescullster]

Interesting - thanks Andy

[Theo]

Surely this depends "Electrical installations should be tested often enough that there is little chance of deterioration leading to danger. Any part of an installation that has become obviously defective between tests should be de-energised until the fault can be fixed."

which suggests there is no mandatory period in law.

Theo

[thescullster]

Thanks Theo

I'll check our insurance details in that case

Phil

[Robin]

One "chapter and verse" answer is "what your employer's risk assessment states is the appropriate period for the server room" :)

But seriously, if your firm is big enough to have a server room then I think it deserves a risk assessment that documents who does what, when. Another bit of HSE guidance on this is

which has "up to 5 years" for testing of office IT generally - but I think that is still only guidance.

[John Kenyon]

I suggest you do a documented risk assessment. Some items which are a risk in an office won't be present in a server room. However some risks which don't exist in the office, exist in the server room - e.g. if you overload a circuit, it will be overloaded 24/7. However some of the risks won't be fully addressed by an EICR, and other control measures may be required (e.g. requiring that each feed to a rack is supplied through its own MCB) Those measures should trigger the appropriate action at the appropriate time - i.e. new rack = MCB install, rather than having an EICR trigger the work 4 years later.

Having done the risk assessment, one of the outputs may be "EICR every

10 years", "Thorough visual inspection every 3 or 5 years, to be carried out at the same time as the office EICR but as a separate task"

Note that you'll be lucky to find a reference that says "You can do it every 10 years", because the reality is that when you want to "push the envelope", you need to look on a case by case basis, hence the need for a specific risk assessment.

[Owain Lastname]

On the other hand, a failure of server room wiring may have considerably more adverse effect than some of the office PCs going down. Therefore you could regard EICRing the server room as part of your proactive maintenance rather than an inconvenience.

Owain