Our 1st Week!
- Leigh Howard
- Apr 15
- 5 min read
We have completed our first week trading as this new exciting company, F & H Projects Ltd!
I'll tell you, it's got our blood pumping, and we're excited to keep the pace up, keep pushing it, and give the best service we can.
Although it's a new company and not many know the F & H name yet, we are lucky to have customers from our previous separate companies still calling us. And Checkatrade has definitely kept us busy all week, as well as the work that we had booked in (which I will go into more detail about below). It feels like we have been non-stop talking with new customers, non-stop going to assess jobs and non-stop typing up quotes!
A Little Context
Myself and John, the directors of F & H Projects Ltd, go way back. We have known each other since Secondary school and have continuously been friends since.
Before John started as an electrician, he worked at the wholesalers (C.E.F & Yesss) and he actually got me in touch with the owner of the company that I went through my apprenticeship with. I learned a lot through working for that company, over various different sectors of the industry.
A lot of the time I felt I was thrown into the deep end, but if I wasn't, I don't think I would be where I am today.
The year after John got me in touch, he then started an apprenticeship too, with another firm. So now we are both learning the trade and occasionally "joking" around that we should start our own company. To be called "JLS - John and Leigh Services" probably because he is a bit like Aston and I could imagine him doing backflips for the customers!
Anyway by the time we were both out of college, John started working with another company and around that time I was feeling like it was time to move on, I was with them for 6 years. John got me over working with this company, so we are pretty close to our idea now, and it went well for a year or so until it started going not so well for this company. Financial problems were becoming a regular occurrence and invoices weren't being paid, that's our queue to leave.
At that point we both went and did our own thing, occasionally helping each other out with different jobs, eventually becoming a regular thing to the point where we thought "this is it, we've got to do it now"
I mean, It's no JLS but F & H Projects feels like a better fit to me!
So what have we been doing this week?
Our first week had us working in a school for a company we were both sub contracting for before we started F & H Projects. BHP Mechanical Services has kept us busy in the past with various jobs from boiler rooms in care homes, apartment blocks and schools.
This time we were tasked with supplying power to a new booster pump set and the guys from BHP were also installing new point of use water heaters.
The booster pump wanted an 18A single phase supply and they was a 3phase distribution board close by on the floor below, although it was an old discontinued Federal Electric unit. Getting an RCBO for this was not an option. So we decided the best option would be to use this DB to supply a new single phase 6 way Fusebox consumer unit in order to have the correct type RCD protecting the equipment.
The cable run was simple. Being in a boiler plant room there was already containment in place, a couple cut lengths of 50mm tray mounted to the walls on stand off brackets were used to bridge the gaps between the existing containment and where we needed to run the cable. Easy work to go between the booster pump and new CU.
We installed a 20A rotary isolator next to the equipment and terminated our cable and the cable supplied, already installed to the panel for the booster. And that's that end good to go! (pending the standard test sequence of course)
The other end of the cable was terminated into the new 6 way Fusebox, on a 20A RCBO. We then proceeded to carry out all the test to ensure our new cable met the requirements of BS7671.
And that was about that with this part of the job. The next task was the new water heaters!
There was evidence of there being water heaters installed previously, which is handy for our electrical installation as the supplies were already in place, so we didn't really have much of a problem with this. A few elements needed updating, the old isolators needed to be replaced as the Spec called for MK switched fused spurs with neon and 2 out of the 4 were not on an RCD protected circuit.
Some of the outgoing cables to the water heaters from the spurs had to be replaced as they had been previously cut off short or were pulled out altogether, this meant pulling new cables through existing conduit (easy peasy) and as they were a fine stranded flex cable, bootlace ferrules were crimped onto the ends to ensure proper termination.
Now bear in mind, all the while that we are on this job, our phones are pinging and pinging and Johns lovely wife (Mrs Info) has the customer facing phone number, on half term...with the kids. But it's looking good for us, She takes calls and messages, passes them onto us and we are going to assess jobs left right and centre! Which is good but obviously even better when we are winning these jobs. We are pretty pumped and hopefully the momentum just keeps going.
I was intending to keep this post slightly shorter, it feels like so much has already happened, too much for one post!
Back to the water heaters. Spurs fitted, water heaters terminated. MEM2 RCCB Pods added to the 2 existing circuits without RCD protection. Last thing to do is test the circuits. Standard test procedure, which every Electrician should be doing to ensure safety of the circuit that has been adapted or if it's new.
Now brings us to the end of the week.
An EICR on a property in Virginia Waters. If you have not read our blog post on EICRs, go take a look! As you can imagine by the location, it's a nice big house. But that doesn't mean there's been a higher quality of workmanship on the installation at this property, A long list of observations on the report for this one. Though most of them C3 and being only improvement recommended, there were still quite a few C2s that meant it was an unsatisfactory report..
Let us know what you would code these:
SWA cable not glanded entering into a switch fuse supplying a consumer unit
No r2 continuity to lighting circuits
Neutral conductors on 2 rings with no continuity
No fire rated downlights with habitable space above
Connections for downlights in connector blocks not enclosed
Smoke alarm bases installed but no detectors fitted and no power at the bases (would you include that in your report)
That is just a few of the observations made!
Anyway, I'll end this here as whilst I've been writing this the contents have given me ideas for more posts!
A shoutout to BHP Mechanical Services Ltd - https://www.bhpmechanicalservicesltd.com/
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