Can we keep using an appliance that failed if it still works?

No. An item that has failed testing must be taken out of service until it is repaired and re-tested. Continuing to use equipment you have documented as unsafe is considerably worse, legally and practically, than never having tested it.

Who is allowed to repair a failed appliance?

A registered electrical worker. Repairing electrical equipment is electrical work under New Zealand law. A competent tester who is not registered can identify and remove a faulty item but cannot repair it.

Do we have to record failures?

Yes, and this is the part most often skipped. A register that shows only passes is not credible. The failures, and what was done about them, are the evidence that the system works.

Is it cheaper to repair or replace a failed lead?

For most extension leads and power boards, replacement is cheaper than a compliant repair once labour and re-testing are counted. For expensive or specialised equipment the calculation reverses. We report it item by item rather than applying a rule.

What happens when an appliance fails a test and tag?

Q: What happens when an appliance fails a test and tag?

The item is tagged out and removed from service immediately. It is then either repaired by a registered electrical worker and re-tested, or disposed of so it cannot re-enter use. Both the failure and its outcome are recorded against the item. A failure you cannot account for later is worse than never having tested it.

Most of the conversation about test and tag is about the items that pass. That is the wrong end of it. The passes are administrative. The failures are the entire point of doing it.

They are also where programmes quietly fall apart.

The moment an item fails

An item fails on one of two grounds: it fails the visual inspection, or it fails an electrical test.

The visual inspection catches most of them. A cord with the outer sheath split. A plug with a cracked body or a pin that has been levered sideways. A strain relief that has pulled out so the conductors are taking the load. A casing gone brittle. Signs of water. Any of these is a fail on sight, before an instrument comes near it.

The electrical tests catch the rest — failed earth continuity on a Class I appliance, insulation resistance below the acceptable value, incorrect polarity in a lead.

When an item fails, three things happen immediately and in this order:

It is disconnected and tagged out. A fail tag goes on, clearly different from the pass tag.
It leaves the work area. Physically. Not "set aside" — removed.
It is recorded as a failure against its item ID, with the reason.

Why the item has to physically leave

This is the part people underestimate, so it is worth being blunt about.

An appliance that has been tagged out and left leaning against the wall of a workshop will be back in service inside a week. Someone will need it, the tag will be read as "somebody's paperwork", and it will get used. We have found tagged-out gear in daily use with the fail tag still attached to the cord.

That is a materially worse position than having no programme at all. You have created a document that says you knew the item was unsafe, alongside evidence that it stayed in use. If anyone is hurt by it, that document is the first thing that gets read.

So: quarantine location, and someone whose job it is to clear it. A labelled bin, a cage, a corner of the store with a sign. It does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist and it needs an owner.

Never leave a failed item where it can be plugged in. If it cannot be removed immediately — a piece of fixed or heavy plant, for instance — isolate it and label the isolation point, not just the appliance.

Repair, replace or dispose

Three outcomes, and only one of them requires a decision.

Repair. Only a registered electrical worker can repair electrical equipment. Replacing a plug, repairing a lead, re-terminating a connection, replacing an element — all of it is electrical work under New Zealand law. When the repair is done, the item is re-tested before it goes back into service, and the re-test is recorded. A repaired item that is not re-tested has not returned to service properly.

Replace. For most leads, power boards and low-value appliances, replacement beats repair on cost once you count the electrician's time and the re-test. It is also usually the better safety outcome, because a lead that has failed once in a given environment tends to fail again.

Dispose. If it is not worth repairing, destroy it rather than storing it. Cut the plug off. An intact-looking appliance in a store room will eventually find its way back into use, and the person who finds it will have no way of knowing it was condemned two years ago.

The decision itself is usually straightforward, but it should be yours, not your provider's. We report failures with a recommendation and a photograph. What happens next is the business's call, and it gets recorded either way.

What has to be recorded

For every failure:

The item identifier and location
The date and who tested it
What failed and why — "failed insulation resistance" or "cord damaged at gland", not just "failed"
The action taken: repaired, replaced, disposed
Who did the repair, if repaired
The re-test date and result, if repaired
The date it returned to service, or the date it left the register

Two of these matter more than the rest and are the two most often missing.

The first is why it failed. A register full of the word "failed" tells you nothing. A register that says "cord damaged at gland" fourteen times tells you that something in that area is chewing through leads and you have a problem no amount of testing will fix.

The second is closing the loop. An item recorded as failed with no subsequent entry is an open question sitting in your records. When someone reviews the register — an auditor, an insurer, a prequalification assessor, a lawyer — that open question is exactly what they will pull on.

What actually fails, and why

Across ordinary New Zealand workplaces, failures cluster heavily around flexible cords and their terminations rather than the appliances themselves. That is not a controversial claim: the cord is the part that gets flexed, run over, pulled, pinched in doors, wound too tight around a hook, and dragged across a floor.

The specific patterns worth knowing:

Damage close to the plug or the appliance entry. The cord fails where it is bent most, which is right at each end. Strain reliefs are there for exactly this reason and are the first thing to check.
Extension leads and power boards, particularly older ones and particularly outdoors. These are usually the highest-failure category on any site and the cheapest to replace.
Hand tools that get dropped. Internal damage does not always show, which is why hand tools are tested at the shortest interval that applies to their environment.
Anything that has been wet and dried out without being checked.
Cheap imported gear bought outside normal purchasing, which is often where the interesting insulation resistance readings come from.

We deliberately do not publish percentages here. Every site is different, and quoting a national failure rate we have not measured would be exactly the sort of confident-sounding statistic this site exists to avoid. What we can tell you is what your own numbers look like — after the first full round on your site, you will have them.

The mistake that undoes the programme

Testing without a process for failures.

It is remarkably common. A provider arrives, tests everything, tags what passes, hands over a summary sheet, and leaves. Failed items are mentioned verbally to whoever happened to be standing there. Nothing is quarantined, nothing is repaired, nothing is recorded.

Six months later the site has tags on the walls and no idea which items were condemned or where they went.

If you are reviewing a provider — or reviewing your own programme — these are the questions:

Where do failed items physically go, and who owns clearing that space?
Who repairs them, and are they a registered electrical worker?
How does a repaired item get re-tested and put back on the register?
Can you produce, right now, a list of every item that failed in the last twelve months and what happened to each one?

If question four cannot be answered in about a minute, the programme is producing stickers rather than evidence. That is the gap we are usually called in to close.