Fuse Board Upgrades in Bournemouth: Your FAQs
Updated: Oct 4
Fuse boards are one of those things people only think about when something goes wrong. Most of the calls we take on this start the same way: a survey has flagged the board halfway through a house purchase, a letting agent wants paperwork, or the lights trip every time the shower runs and nobody can work out why.
Bournemouth's housing stock makes it a regular job for us. There are whole streets of 1930s semis in Winton and Charminster, and a lot of Victorian and Edwardian houses in Boscombe and Southbourne that were carved into flats decades ago. Plenty are still running on a wooden-backed board, or a plastic split-load unit fitted in the early 2000s. These are the questions we get asked most, answered the way we'd answer them on a doorstep.
Do I actually need a new consumer unit?
Not every old board needs ripping out, and we'll tell you if yours doesn't. What we're looking for is fairly specific:
Rewireable fuse carriers, the sort with fuse wire you replace yourself. If you've got those, the board predates any kind of RCD protection.
A wooden back panel or an all-plastic enclosure. Since the 18th Edition, boards in a house or flat need a non-combustible enclosure, which in practice means steel.
No RCD or RCBO protection, so nothing cuts the supply quickly enough if someone puts a spade through a cable in the garden.
Every way used up with no room to add a circuit. This comes up constantly when someone wants an EV charger, an electric shower or a supply out to a garden office.
Nuisance tripping that keeps coming back, which is usually a symptom of a fault the board can't isolate to one circuit.
If none of that applies and the board is sound, we'll say so and quote for whatever is actually failing instead.
What does a fuse board upgrade cost in Bournemouth?
We survey before we quote, always, because the price is set less by the board itself than by what's sitting behind it. That said, here's roughly where our jobs in and around Bournemouth land in 2026:
Straight swap to a 10-way metal dual-RCD board, existing circuits testing clean: £600 to £840, including testing and certification.
Full RCBO board, where every circuit gets its own protection so a fault in the garage doesn't take the freezer out with it: £840 to £1,200.
Surge protection fitted at the same time: £95 to £180 on top.
Main protective bonding to gas and water where it's missing or undersized: £145 to £240.
A full EICR on a typical three-bed before we start: £240 to £360.
Those are our prices to you rather than trade cost, and they cover labour, materials, testing and certification. Older properties do cost more and we won't pretend otherwise. The Victorian conversions around Boscombe often turn up borrowed neutrals, or a lighting circuit that's been extended three times by three different people. That's remedial work, and it gets quoted separately once we've actually seen it.
How long will the power be off?
For a straightforward replacement, expect the supply down for four to six hours, with us on site a little longer either side. Where testing throws up remedials it becomes a full day. We'll tell you which we think it is before we isolate anything, not after.
Practical bit: don't book it for a day you've got back-to-back video calls. Keep the freezer shut and it'll be fine. If you genuinely can't lose the working day we can sometimes run a temporary supply to one socket, but mention it when you book rather than on the morning.
Do I need an EICR first, and who tells building control?
If you own and live in the place, an EICR isn't a legal requirement. We'd still usually suggest one on any house we haven't worked on before. A new board with RCBOs will find every existing fault in the wiring the day it goes in, and it's better to know that in advance than to be standing in the hallway at four in the afternoon discovering it together.
Landlords have less room for choice. A domestic EICR is required every five years, and 2026 is a heavy renewal year because a lot of rentals were first certified when the regulations came in during 2020 and 2021. Those certificates are running out now.
Replacing a consumer unit is notifiable work under Part P of the Building Regulations. We deal with that end of it: you get the Electrical Installation Certificate and the building control notification, and there's nothing for you to fill in.
Does a new board mean I need a full rewire?
Usually not, and this is the biggest misconception we run into. The board and the wiring behind it are two separate questions. A modern board on sound PVC cabling is a perfectly good outcome, and very common in houses that were rewired in the eighties or nineties.
Where it turns into a bigger conversation is rubber or lead-sheathed cable, which we still find now and then in properties untouched since the sixties. That perishes, and no consumer unit will fix it. If we spot it during the survey we'll show you, explain what a staged rewire actually involves, and let you decide on timing rather than dressing it up as an emergency when it isn't. Consumer units, rewires and wider electrical work run through the same team here, so it stays one conversation rather than three.
Related reading
Booking one in
If your board has fuse wire in it, a wooden back, or no spare ways for the EV charger you're planning next year, it's worth looking at now rather than in January when the shower finally trips for good. We work across Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch and the wider Dorset and Hampshire area, and we survey before quoting so the figure we give you is the figure you pay.
Book a survey with Complete Builds and we'll come and see what you've actually got behind that lid.
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