Electrician in East London

Find your area

Every one of these pages has local prices, the housing stock we work on, and the faults we find there. If your street is not named on one of them, ring us anyway — the boundaries below are honest, the page list is just not finished yet.

Hackney — E5, E8, E9, N1, N16

Hackney borough · E8 Hackney Central and London Fields · Hackney Central · Dalston · London Fields · Clapton · Stoke Newington · Homerton · Hackney Wick · Hoxton. Service-specific: EICR Hackney · fuse board replacement · house rewire · emergency callout.

Tower Hamlets — E1, E2, E3, E14

Tower Hamlets borough · E1 Whitechapel and Shadwell · E2 Bethnal Green · E3 Bow · E14 Poplar and Canary Wharf · Whitechapel · Bethnal Green · Bow · Limehouse · Poplar and the Isle of Dogs. Service-specific: EICR · fuse board replacement · house rewire · emergency callout.

Newham — E6, E7, E12, E13, E15, E16

Stratford · Canning Town · East Ham · Forest Gate · Plaistow · Manor Park · Beckton. Service-specific: EICR Newham · fuse board replacement · consumer unit replacement · emergency callout · EV charger installation.

Waltham Forest — E4, E10, E11, E17

Walthamstow E17 · Leyton E10 · Leytonstone E11 · Chingford E4. Service-specific: EICR · fuse board replacement · consumer unit replacement · emergency callout.

Everything else, including the north and central boroughs, is indexed on the London service areas hub and on electrician North London.

What it costs

All prices below are labour and certification only, inclusive of VAT. Materials — boards, accessories, cable, fittings, EV units — are itemised separately so you can see what you are paying for. Our minimum charge is one hour at the standard rate, £90 + VAT = £108 inc VAT; standard labour is £90/hr + VAT. Nothing is priced below the minimum charge.

Inspection, testing and reports

Job	Price inc VAT
EICR, 1–2 bedroom flat	£140
EICR, 3 bedroom house or flat	£170
EICR, 4 bedroom house	£200
EICR, 5 bedroom or converted house on one intake	£250
EICR, larger or multi-board property	£300–£400
HMO EICR, by unit count and board arrangement	£250–£500
Commercial EICR, shop or small office	from £220
PAT testing	about £5 per appliance, £108 minimum visit
Attend, fault-find, test and report	£108 first hour, then £108/hr — comes off the job if we do the repair
Out of hours, evenings, weekends and bank holidays	£60 + VAT per half hour

Installation and remedial work

Job	Price inc VAT, labour and certification
Consumer unit replacement, 6-way	from £550
Consumer unit replacement, 10-way	from £650
Consumer unit replacement, 12-way and above	from £750
Board replacement plus a full EICR on the same visit	£690
Earthing and bonding put right alongside other work	£108
Main protective bonding, one service within reach	£108
Main bonding, both services, long or awkward route	£180–£420
New single circuit — board to accessory, accessible route	£240–£420
Flat rewire, 1 bed / 2 bed / 3 bed	£2,200–£3,200 / £3,000–£4,500 / £4,200–£6,000
House rewire, terrace or semi upwards	£2,800–£4,000 and up — see the rewire cost ladder
Partial rewire, worst circuits only	£1,600–£3,000
EV charge point, dedicated circuit	from £450
TT earthing conversion where there is no usable supply earth	£850

Notifiable work — a new circuit, a board change, or an alteration in a bathroom or shower room — is notified through our NICEIC registration at no extra charge, and the Building Regulations compliance certificate follows from the scheme. How that works, and what to do about work a previous electrician never notified, is set out in our guide to Part P and Building Control notification.

What we actually find in east London wiring

No two of these boroughs have the same housing stock, but the same seven things come up on report after report.

1. A main earth clamped to a water service that is now plastic. Mains renewal across Hackney and Waltham Forest has replaced a lot of lead and iron with blue MDPE, and the old earth clamp often stays bolted to a dead pipe. That is a C1 — danger present — and it is the single most common immediate-danger code we issue. Full explanation on no main earth, what does it mean.
2. Bonding that never followed the gas meter outside. When a meter goes into an external box the bond frequently does not get moved or extended, or it is 6 mm² where 10 mm² is wanted on a PME supply. Priced by the route, not the house — see main bonding cost.
3. Sound 1980s–90s rewires behind a board that has aged out. This is the commonest misdiagnosis in E17, E10 and E5. The cable is fine; the board is a rewireable or an early split-load with no RCD on half the circuits. That is a board from £550, not a rewire — and anyone quoting four thousand pounds without lifting a floorboard should be asked why.
4. Victorian and Edwardian terraces cut into two or three flats on a single intake. Endemic from Stoke Newington down through Bethnal Green and across Forest Gate and Leyton. The top-floor tenant often cannot isolate their own supply without going through somebody else’s hallway, the meters are stacked in a cupboard with no labelling, and borrowed neutrals between flats are common. It is an EICR per installation, and we price on circuit count, never bedroom count.
5. Warehouse and light-industrial conversions along the Lea. Hackney Wick, Fish Island and the Blackhorse Lane end of Walthamstow are full of units converted in stages, usually with a three-phase intake that has been informally split between tenancies and extended again every time somebody moved in. These need a commercial EICR circuit by circuit, and the remedials are usually about distribution and labelling rather than cable condition.
6. New-build flats on heat networks with no gas at all. Stratford and the Olympic Park, Canning Town and the Royal Docks, Blackhorse Lane. The board is modern and the certificate is recent, but there is nothing on the gas side to bond, the load profile is all-electric, and the issue is almost always capacity and permission rather than condition: no spare ways for an EV charger, a communal riser you cannot touch without the managing agent, and isolation that has to be booked. Absence of gas bonding here is correct, not a defect — but it has to be recorded in words on the certificate rather than left as a blank box.
7. Buried flat twin-and-earth to sheds, garden offices, gate motors and pumps. The lower Lea Valley gardens sit on flood-plain ground that never really dries out, and unprotected cable at spade depth is the usual finding. A garden building needs its own properly protected submain; see EICRs for garages, outbuildings and garden offices.

Landlords, HMOs and licensing

East London is where most of our landlord work is. A rented home needs a satisfactory EICR at least every five years and at the start of a new tenancy, with 28 days to put right anything coded C1, C2 or FI — our landlord electrical safety certificate guide sets out the documents you should be holding and the compliance checklist goes item by item.

HMOs are a bigger job than a single EICR: the fire alarm grade and category, emergency lighting where there is an internal escape route, and the licence conditions on top. Start with HMO EICRs and HMO electrical compliance. Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest all operate licensing schemes that have changed more than once in recent years and that vary street by street — always check your council’s current scheme for your address rather than assuming last year’s position still holds. We will tell you what the installation needs; the licence itself is between you and the borough.

Shops, parades and light industrial

The E-postcode high streets — Mare Street, Kingsland Road, Bethnal Green Road, Roman Road, Green Street, High Street North, Hoe Street, Leytonstone High Road — are shop units with flats above, usually on a shared intake, and they throw up the same two problems. First, a unit that has been through four tenants has four generations of undocumented alteration behind the counter, so budget for remedials and not just for the report. Second, the stair and hallway lighting for the flats above is very often fed from the shop’s circuits, which means the tenants upstairs lose their landing light when the shop isolates or goes out of business. Sorting that out is a landlord’s job and it is worth doing before an inspector finds it.

For commercial premises we do fixed-wire testing and reporting, three-phase distribution work, shop and office lighting, fit-outs, and PAT testing on the same visit where it makes sense. Fire alarm and emergency lighting work is to BS 5839 and BS 5266 and is certificated as such.

Where east London stops for us

Honestly: at the Waltham Forest and Newham boundaries. Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham, Havering and the Essex side are outside the patch we work properly — the drive stops making sense and we would rather say so than take a job we cannot get back to. If you are in Ilford, Woodford or Barking, ring and ask: we will take it if we are already that way and tell you plainly if we are not.

Going the other way, we cover Haringey, Enfield, Islington, Camden and Barnet from the same base — see electrician North London and electrician Tottenham — plus central London EC and W1 work.

One geography note worth having. E20, the Olympic Park, is split across four boroughs — Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest — and E postcodes generally do not respect borough lines. It makes no difference to the certificate, which comes from us under BS 7671 and our NICEIC registration either way. It decides which council holds the building control record, which licensing scheme applies to a rental, and which planning department to ask about anything on an external wall. That is why we ask for the full postcode rather than the area.

Common questions

How quickly can you get to east London from Tottenham?

Hackney and Walthamstow are both roughly twenty minutes outside the rush hour; Stratford and Bow nearer half an hour; the Isle of Dogs and the Royal Docks longer again via the Blackwall Tunnel approach. We will not promise you a fixed number of minutes — anybody who does has not driven the Lea Bridge Road at five o’clock. What we will do is tell you honestly when we can be there, and if we cannot get to you today we will say so rather than book you in and miss it. For genuine emergencies see emergency electrician London.

Do you charge a callout fee?

No separate callout fee. The first hour is £108 inc VAT, which is our minimum charge, and it comes off the job if we go on to do the work. Out of hours is £60 + VAT per half hour. You will know the position before we set off.

My flat is in a converted terrace with one meter cupboard for three flats. Whose EICR is it?

Each flat is its own installation and needs its own report; the landlord’s or freeholder’s responsibility covers the intake, the communal distribution and the shared areas. In practice we test what we can isolate and record what we cannot reach as FI — further investigation — rather than guessing. If the cupboard is locked and the managing agent cannot be raised on the day, that is what the report will say, and we would far rather issue an honest FI than a tidy-looking certificate that is not true.

Do I need a rewire or just a new fuse board?

In most east London property of 1980s wiring or later, a new board. The honest test is an EICR first: it tells you whether the cable insulation and the circuit protective conductors are sound, which is what decides it. If they are, you are looking at a board from £550. If they are not — rubber or lead-sheathed cable, no earth to the lighting, VIR gone brittle — then the rewire ladder applies. We would rather sell you the £550 job and tell you the truth than the other way round.

More from us

Every guide we have written, with prices and the regulation behind each answer, is on the electrical guides hub. Area pages for the rest of our patch are on London service areas. Our About page covers our qualifications and accreditations, and the full list of what we do is on services.