There is a combination microwave in an office kitchen off Sheffield Road in Chesterfield that has never been tested. It is bolted into a run of units at head height. The plug sits behind a fixed cupboard panel, reachable only by unscrewing the trim. It has been there for nine years, gets used forty times a day, and every annual test certificate for that building lists the kettle, the toaster, the fridge and four phone chargers. Not the microwave.
Nobody made a decision to leave it out. The tester could not reach the plug in the ten minutes available, the office manager assumed anything built in was somebody else's problem, and the electrician who did the fixed wire test stopped at the socket outlet. Three reasonable people, one unmonitored appliance carrying the heaviest duty cycle in the room.
This is the gap the industry tried to close by changing the name of the service. It did not work.
What is EET testing?
EET stands for Electrical Equipment Testing. You will also see ITEE, Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment, and occasionally COPISITEE, which is what people who read the standard call it when they are being funny. All three describe the same work that has been called PAT testing since the 1990s: a combination of visual inspection and instrument testing to decide whether a piece of electrical equipment is safe to keep using.
The change traces back to the 5th edition of the IET Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment, published in October 2020. The 5th edition was a genuine rewrite rather than a refresh. Outside of explanatory notes it stopped using the words "portable" and "appliance" altogether, and it removed the old equipment classifications: hand-held, portable, movable, stationary and fixed. In their place is a risk-based approach that asks what the equipment is, where it lives, who uses it, how it is constructed and how likely it is to be damaged. The old habit of looking up a category in a table and copying an interval out of it went with them.
Nothing in law changed. The duty still comes from the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, which require electrical systems to be maintained so as to prevent danger, and from regulation 5 of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998. HSE guidance in HSG107 and INDG236 still sits underneath it. No statutory instrument has ever used the phrase "PAT testing", and none uses "EET testing" either.
Why we still say PAT testing
Because that is what our customers search for, write in their health and safety policies, and get asked about by insurers and inspectors. A care home manager preparing for a CQC inspection is not going to be marked down for the wrong acronym. A letting agent is not going to lose a compliance argument because the certificate header says one thing rather than another. We use both terms, we test to the 5th edition, and we are not going to make anybody learn a new word to buy a service they already understand. Our PAT testing pages say PAT for the same reason road signs still say petrol station.
The rename fixed a symptom, not the disease
The official reasoning for dropping "portable" was that people read the word literally and assumed only carryable items counted. That is true as far as it goes. But renaming the service does not put a tester's hands on a hard-wired hand dryer, and it does not resolve who is responsible for it.
James Eade, who wrote the 5th edition, described the real problem plainly in the IET's own Wiring Matters: equipment like this falls through a gap, with the person carrying out the EICR stopping at the fused connection unit or isolator and the PAT tester treating the item beyond it as part of the installation. That is a scoping and ownership problem. It exists whether you call the service PAT, EET or anything else, and it is still there five years after the rename because almost nobody writes down where one contractor's scope ends and the other's begins. If you are unclear on how the two services divide up, our post on the difference between an EICR and appliance testing is worth reading alongside this one.
The equipment that actually gets missed
Across Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, these are the items we most often find with no test history at all, in buildings where everything else is up to date:
Built-in and bolted-in microwaves and coffee machines. Under-counter fridges and dishwashers where the socket is behind the unit. Wall-mounted panel heaters and towel rails on a plug. Hard-wired hand dryers in customer toilets. Extract fans in commercial kitchens. Water boilers and instant hot taps. Vending and drinks machines, which are frequently owned by a supplier who assumes the site tests them while the site assumes the supplier does. Ceiling-mounted projectors in schools, which almost never appear on an asset list because they are out of sight and out of reach. Electric gates, car park barriers, illuminated signage and roller shutter motors. In care homes, ceiling track hoists, profiling bed motors and pressure-relieving mattress pumps, which are among the highest-risk items in the building because they are in constant use around vulnerable people. Our care home testing visits routinely turn up bed motors with no label on them in homes that have a thick folder of certificates for everything in the office.
Schools have a particular version of this problem. Design technology and science departments have hard-wired extraction, kilns, fume cupboards and bench isolators alongside hundreds of plug-in items, and the plug-in items are the ones that get done. We cover how to structure that split in our school PAT testing work.
How to close the gap in your building
Three things fix this, and none of them involve terminology.
First, build the asset list by walking the building rather than by looking at last year's certificate. Last year's certificate only contains what was tested last year, so copying it forward guarantees the same omissions forever. Walk each room and write down every item that consumes electricity, including the ones you cannot easily unplug and the ones somebody else owns.
Second, decide in writing where appliance testing stops and fixed installation work starts, item by item, for the awkward equipment. If the hand dryers are covered by your EICR contractor, note it. If they are not, they belong on the appliance schedule. The written boundary matters more than which side of it each item falls on.
Third, insist your report records equipment that was not tested and why. "Not accessible: microwave built in, plug behind fixed panel" is a useful line on a report. It tells you to book a joiner or an extra half hour next time. A report that silently omits the item tells you nothing and leaves you believing the building is clear.
Some fixed items need isolation, safe access, or a second pair of hands, and that takes time. We price by visit length rather than per item for exactly this reason: up to an hour from £50, half a day from £125, a full day from £250. If a site has built-in equipment we would rather book the time to do it properly than produce a tidy certificate that quietly excludes the hardest-working appliance in the room.
If you want a second opinion on whether your current schedule has holes in it, bring last year's certificate and we will walk the site against it. We cover Chesterfield and the surrounding Derbyshire and South Yorkshire area, with a second branch in York.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is EET testing and is it different from PAT testing?
EET stands for Electrical Equipment Testing, and it describes exactly the same work that has been called PAT testing since the 1990s: visual inspection plus instrument testing to decide whether equipment is safe to keep using. You may also see it called ITEE, Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment. The name changed with the 5th edition of the IET Code of Practice in October 2020, but the actual work and the legal duties behind it did not.
Did the law change when PAT testing was renamed to EET?
No. The duty still comes from the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, which require electrical systems to be maintained so as to prevent danger, and from regulation 5 of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, with HSE guidance in HSG107 and INDG236 sitting underneath. No statutory instrument has ever used the phrase PAT testing, and none uses EET testing either.
Does fixed or built-in equipment need PAT testing?
Yes. The 5th edition of the IET Code of Practice dropped the words portable and appliance precisely because people assumed only carryable items counted. Built-in microwaves, hard-wired hand dryers, water boilers, vending machines, ceiling-mounted projectors and care home bed motors all need in-service inspection and testing, and they are the items most often found with no test history at all.
Who is responsible for testing hard-wired appliances, the EICR contractor or the PAT tester?
This is exactly where equipment falls through the gap: the EICR contractor often stops at the fused connection unit or isolator, while the appliance tester treats anything beyond it as part of the installation. There is no fixed rule, so the answer is to decide in writing, item by item, where appliance testing stops and fixed installation work starts. The written boundary matters more than which side of it each item falls on.
How do I make sure nothing gets missed off my PAT testing schedule?
Build the asset list by walking the building rather than copying last year's certificate, because copying it forward guarantees the same omissions forever. Write down every item that consumes electricity, including ones you cannot easily unplug and ones a supplier owns. Then insist your report records any equipment that was not tested and why, so a line like "not accessible: microwave built in, plug behind fixed panel" prompts action next visit.