Over 20,000 fires are caused by electricity every year!

How safe is your Fuse Box / Consumer Unit?

Your fuse box or consumer unit should be easy to find in case of emergency and is where the electricity in your home is controlled.

It’s vital that you know where your fuse box is on the chance that you ever need to kill the power in a crisis. It contains three things – main switch,  wireable fuses or circuit breakers, and Residual Current Devices.

A) Main Switch – this enables you to kill the power supply to your home. You may have more than one mains switch, for instance, if your home has electric heating.  You may have a different fuse box.

B) Residual Current Devices (RCD) these are switches that trip a circuit under fault conditions, and in a split second disengage the power.

C) Circuit Breakers – these turn off a circuit in the event that they recognize a direct fault.

If your fuse box has a wooden back, solid metal switches, coloured pull out fuses it is likely that it goes back to before the 1960s and should be replaced.

Read the full story from the bbc news