EICR in Aberdeenshire, for properties with more than one fuse board.

A typical Aberdeenshire farmhouse and steading installation looks nothing like a city flat. There is an intake and meter, sometimes pole mounted, sometimes sitting in an outbuilding rather than the house. From the origin, armoured sub mains run out to wherever the buildings are.

The farmhouse board covers lighting, sockets, cooker, shower and immersion. Then there is usually a board in the converted steading, often now a holiday let or an annexe. A workshop board, which may be three phase. A board at the stables. Sometimes a supply out to a pump house or a borehole. It is one installation, so it is one report, but the work involved scales with every board on it.

Here is what actually changes for the inspector, none of which any competing page mentions:

• Finding the true origin. On rural property this is often not obvious. Pole mounted intakes, meters in outbuildings, and historic supplies that were split when a steading was sold off all have to be resolved before any testing starts.
• Verifying every sub main. Each one needs the cable type and size checked against the load and the length, voltage drop over the run, the correct protective device at the supply end, proper isolation at the far end, an adequate protective conductor, and correct glanding where the armour itself is doing the earthing job.
• A separate schedule per board. Every board gets its own schedule of circuit details and test results. Four boards means four schedules, four sets of readings and four sets of RCD tests.
• Selectivity between devices. With protection at the origin and protection again at the outbuilding, an earth fault in the stables should trip the stables device and not black out the farmhouse. It is a genuine check and it is commonly missed.
• Circuit count. A flat might be six circuits. A farmhouse with three outbuildings is routinely twenty five to forty, and every one is individually tested and individually recorded.
• Physical access. Boards in lofts, in byres, behind stacked feed, at height, or in a building nobody has opened this year. Anything that cannot be reached has to be recorded on the report as an agreed limitation, and that happens far more often out here.

Section 705 of BS 7671 covers agricultural and horticultural premises, and it applies to the fixed installation of any building, area or location on them, indoors or out. It exists because these are genuinely harsher environments: livestock, conductive liquids, dust, corrosive atmospheres, damp, rodents and a raised fire risk.

Two consequences matter on an inspection:

• RCD protection is required irrespective of the earthing system. This is the one that catches people out. A farm on a normal TN supply does not escape the requirement just because its earthing is conventional, so the assumption that "we are not TT, we are fine" does not hold.
• Supplementary bonding where livestock are kept. Everything an animal can touch has to be tied together. Livestock are far more sensitive to touch voltage than we are, and in slurry conditions bonding corrodes away quietly. A PME earth is also not the recommended arrangement in livestock locations such as milking parlours.

There is also a scoping question that comes up on nearly every farm we inspect. The farmhouse is a dwelling and is assessed as one. The working buildings are agricultural premises and are assessed against Section 705. Judging a byre by domestic expectations produces a wrong report in both directions, so we are clear at the start about which parts of the holding are in scope and on what basis.

If the farmhouse is let, the dwelling carries the legal duty covered further down this page. The working buildings are usually driven by your insurer rather than by housing law, and insurers increasingly ask.

The coding framework is the same everywhere. What differs completely is what actually turns up. These are the findings we see repeatedly on older Aberdeenshire property.

Typically coded C1, danger present: exposed live conductors at a broken outbuilding accessory or a smashed weatherproof enclosure on a byre wall; perished cable within reach in a stable or workshop; a farm distribution board with the enclosure missing and live parts accessible; rodent stripped cable with conductors showing in a loft or feed store; and on a TT installation, a broken or missing connection at the earth electrode, because nothing else is providing protection.

Typically coded C2, potentially dangerous: rubber, lead sheathed or fabric braided cable in pre 1960s farm cottages, which goes hard and then crumbles at the terminations where it has been heat cycled for decades; lighting circuits with no protective conductor, so metal fittings and switch plates have no earth at all; rewireable fuse boards with no RCD protection anywhere; missing or undersized main bonding; missing supplementary bonding in livestock areas; rodent damage not yet exposing conductors; corroded outbuilding accessories where salt air on the Buchan and Banffshire coast has long since defeated the ingress rating; undersized or unprotected sub mains, often plain twin and earth run underground or clipped along a fence; and decades of undocumented additions that cannot be traced.

Typically flagged for further investigation: a concealed sub main between farmhouse and steading of unknown route, cable type and size; circuits that cannot be identified or traced to a load; buildings that could not be accessed on the day; and evidence of heat damage with no identifiable cause.

One thing worth knowing before you book: any C1, C2 or further investigation item makes the report unsatisfactory, and a C3 on its own does not. Rural properties generate further investigation items far more often than city ones, purely because undocumented historic work is normal here, and that code keeps the report unsatisfactory until the investigation is actually done. For the code definitions themselves see our guide to C1, C2 and C3 codes, and if your report has already come back unsatisfactory, what to do next.