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Rewiring a house

Things to plan when rewiring a house.

I had my house in Wales rewired as the first task; there's plaster everywhere and it gets a proper set of sockets in to power off. I went for a sparky rather than DIY as it's so much quicker, and you'll need one in anyway to test your circuits. Expect a few days (roughly a week for 7 rooms).

Sparky will channel out grooves for the cables in the plaster down to the brickwork. This is loud and very very dusty. Circuits generally run around the floor above; so your sockets and lighting circuits for your ground floor will go up the wall into below the floorboards of the first floor. And so on to the top floor where they will be channeled up the plaster into the attic. There may well be alternatives to this - eg running behind hollow skirting. It might be worth marking these channels up somehow on skirting/ceiling so when it's all plastered in you still know where they are.

Sparky isn't a plasterer. You're going to be left with dirty great holes in the wall. Prepare to plaster or get one in.

Put in lots and lots of sockets:

What else might want wiring: TV? Burglar alarm? Telephone? Ethernet? Speaker extensions? Get more than you need wired; having a Telephone, TV and ethernet to every room whether or not you think you need it, then it's there if you want to rearrange things in the future.

A double socket, telephone and ethernet cable installed under the stairs means you can hide away your server, ADSL modem, router, terabytes of hard drives, etc.

A couple of single lamp sockets in a room can be wired to the main light switch, so they come on at the same time. This is more flexible than wall-lights.

Bathrooms:

External sockets:

External lighting: I've gone for the two level lights; the soft light in the 'off' lights up the area well enough without creating pools of dark shadow. The brighter motion-triggered 'on' is handy for finding your feet, keys, etc.