Do Houses Need a Separate Ring Main for Each Floor?

mrobsessed

I was looking at a guide to Part P earlier and in particular at the diagram showing a wiring schematic for a typical house. I noticed that there were separate ring mains for the sockets on each of the two floors - is this now required by law or just a guide for new work? My own house has 2 floors and an attic and there is only one ring main - would I need to get this changed to be 'regulation'?

DVardysShadow

You need to check the actual regs. It used to be that a single ring was limited to a max floor area of 100m^2

Mankysteve

I'm no electrician but I do know that there's no requirement to update old electrics up to current regs.

There no danger from this as long as your not overloading the circuit and your MCB/fuse are there to protect against that and the wiring is safe and appropriately rated then there s

If you start getting regular fuse blows that can not be traced back to a single appliance then i would consider splitting the floors.

CaptainKidd

Like mentiond before any wiring/accesories installed at a certain time only have to comply with the regs at that time. Also as mentioned a 100mtrsquared floor area is the adopted rule for a ring.

The other reason now for seperate rings is that there are more things being plugged in now rather than say 30 years ago, also the convenience that if you have 3 ring mains and 1 trips then it does not turn off all 3 unless they are all covered by the same RCD but individual RCBO's would solve this.