Electrical safety: wiring a wet home the way Sweden requires

A bathroom is the one room where water and electricity live inside the same walls, which is why Sweden regulates the wiring of wet spaces as tightly as the waterproofing. The framework is the Electrical Safety Act, in force since 1 July 2017 and overseen by Elsäkerhetsverket, the National Electrical Safety Board. It replaced a system based on individual tradesmen with one based on company responsibility.

Companies are accountable, work is self-audited

Under the current system, any business doing electrical installation work must be registered with the board and must run a self-audit programme (egenkontrollprogram) describing how it ensures the work is safe and correct. Authorisation is held by individuals — the qualified electrician — while the company must appoint a person responsible for regulatory compliance. The board supervises by checking that companies actually follow their own programme and the rules.

The effect is that electrical safety is not left to the goodwill of whoever shows up; it is a documented corporate obligation with an authority watching.

Standards do the technical work

The Act sets the responsibilities; the technical "how" lives in the Swedish electrical installation standards. In wet rooms, those standards drive the details that keep people safe:

• Zones. A bathroom is divided into zones based on proximity to water. Each zone limits what equipment may be installed and what ingress protection (IP) rating it must have, so nothing unsuitable ends up where it can get wet.
• Residual-current protection. Circuits serving wet areas are protected by a residual-current device (jordfelsbrytare) that cuts power in a fraction of a second if current leaks to earth — the single most important protection against electric shock.
• Equipotential bonding. Metal parts are bonded together so they cannot sit at dangerous voltage differences.
• Correct fixtures. Luminaires, sockets, heated floors and towel rails are specified to the zone they sit in.

Tested, certified, documented

Electrical work is not finished when it powers on. It is inspected and tested, and the results recorded, so there is evidence the installation is safe — not just an assumption. That documentation matters when a home is sold, insured, or simply lived in for years.

Coordinated with the wet-room trades

Electrical installations in wet rooms intersect with waterproofing and tiling — a heated floor under a membrane, a fitting through a tiled wall — so the electrical rules are coordinated with those trades. The 2026 wet-room tiling rules, for instance, specifically address electrical installations in wet rooms. The goal is the same as everywhere in this system: no gap between trades where responsibility falls away.

What this means on an M5 project

We wire wet spaces to this discipline: appropriate zone protection, residual-current devices on wet-area circuits, proper bonding, fixtures rated for where they sit, and testing with a record you keep. Local licensing and approvals are followed in full — and on top of them, we add the Swedish habit of treating every wet-room circuit as a safety system to be proven, not presumed.