What decides the price of an electrical CoC

What you are actually paying for

A Certificate of Compliance is not a piece of paper, it is the inspection behind the paper. A registered person walks the installation, tests every circuit, checks the earth, the bonding, the earth leakage and the board, writes down the readings, and only then signs. The certificate and the test report are what your conveyancer and your insurer want to see. The price is the time and the instruments that inspection takes, nothing else.

My price is R3 000 for the first DB board, whatever the size of the house. Additional DB boards are quoted, because each one is a separate installation to inspect. Repairs are quoted separately and itemised, so the certificate fee stays one clean number you can plan around.

Standard single-phase homes, in the Vaal Triangle, Sasolburg and beyond. Where a callout applies it is R300, waived when you accept the quote. Sasolburg and Vaalpark are across the river, so I tell you about the travel up front instead of hiding it in the price.

What moves the price up or down

Four things, and none of them are a mystery. They decide how long a proper inspection takes, which is what any honest quote is really measuring. My own certificate fee is flat for the first board, so where these things add work they show up as extra boards or as repairs quoted separately, never as a bigger inspection fee sprung on you at the end.

The number of circuits. A CoC is not one test. Every circuit gets checked, so a house with sixteen circuits takes longer than a townhouse with six. A proper inspection means every circuit, the earth, the bonding, the earth leakage and the board. If someone offers you a twenty-minute inspection, they are not testing anything.

Outbuildings and extras. A cottage, a workshop, a borehole, a pool pump, a lapa, a pool light. Each one is more circuits and more walking, and a second DB board is a second installation.

Travel. Plots around Meyerton, Henley-on-Klip and Riversdale mean long drives. Some firms add a rate per kilometre on top. I would rather tell you about it up front.

The age of the wiring. Older Vaal housing stock, and there is plenty of it, takes longer to inspect because there is more to look at and more to write up.

Repairs are the part people forget

The certificate fee is not always the whole bill. If part of the installation is not safe, it has to be fixed before a certificate can be issued. What that comes to depends entirely on what is wrong: a breaker that has to be swapped is a small job, an earthing problem or a board that has to be rebuilt is not. Nobody can tell you that number before somebody has looked, and anyone who quotes you repairs sight unseen is guessing.

So keep a cushion aside when you budget for a sale, and get the inspection done early enough that you have room to deal with whatever turns up. Every repair I find comes to you as its own written price before I touch anything.

Who pays, and when

The seller is responsible for getting and paying for the compliance certificates, and the cost is usually settled out of the sale proceeds. The certificates must be in place before registration of transfer, and the bank financing the buyer's bond normally wants the electrical Certificate of Compliance before it grants the loan. Most conveyancers will not move without the full set, which for a Vaal sale usually means the electrical certificate, and the electric fence certificate if there is a fence.

Home loan volumes are up and first-time buyers are a bigger share of the market than they have been in years, so transfers are moving. Book the inspection early rather than in the last week before registration. It is much cheaper to fix a problem in week one than in the week the transfer is meant to go through.

Why a R500 certificate is not a bargain

Certificates are sold online for R500 with nobody setting foot in the house. An inspection of every circuit with test instruments cannot be done for R500, so it is not being done. The Department of Employment and Labour and the ECA(SA) both publish fraud warnings about exactly this. When the buyer's electrician finds the faults, the seller pays for the repairs anyway, after the deadline and under pressure. I wrote a longer guide on that here.