Full electrical rewire - anything missing?

hc25036

anotherginger wrote: »

Thanks, all food for thought!

In terms of internet, it would be great to have it wired to all rooms. The barrier is time and costs, and know-how! Is this something simple for an electrician to do? Everything I have read up on it sounds like there would be work for me to do afterwards with putting face plates on and getting the wires sorted in a central 'hub'. Should I just ask the electrician to run a cat5 cable to each room and putting a blank plate on it until we have some time on our hands? I assume I would also need to run a connection from the router to the 'hub'? (It would make most sense for the central location to be under the stairs which is also where the fuse box will be).

A good electrician will have a good idea and it's pretty much what you said. Make sure there re power points ner the router though!

LEJC

I think with a rewire everyone is different and will throw different perspectives on what you need and what you dont....

Having just had a rewire we started with a similar list of wants,which quickly became more of a list of needs once we recieved the quote...

Do you have a budget in mind or is it simply a rewire for your use rather than the cost taking a major part...I'm asking this particularly with your suggestion of having wired in smoke alarms in all downstairs rooms....we opted for 2 one up and one down basically because the cost was £120 per unit fitted....and this is how our list of wants suddenly became a list of needs rather than desires....

of course its very difficult to compare 2 rewires each one will be different ,I dont think we were extravagant with what we had,and I'm certainly happy with how it turned out but it did end up costing us just short of £4000 but its also easy to trim back on somethings that will be adding to the total cost...

Happy-Days_3

anotherginger wrote: »

What type of cable should I be asking for to run Virgin to other rooms? We don't have a tv aerial.

We have sky and that uses a double co-axial cable. Not sure about Virgin, either single or double Co-axial cable I would have thought. But either way, just ask for a price so that you have cable points in rooms X, Y and Z of the house, he/she should be able to sort it out quite easily. Might cost £50-£80 per point. But the cable ain't free and if you are going to have a TV in the other rooms it will be worth it over the hassle of running the cable post re-wire.

anotherginger wrote: »

In terms of internet, it would be great to have it wired to all rooms. The barrier is time and costs, and know-how! Is this something simple for an electrician to do? Everything I have read up on it sounds like there would be work for me to do afterwards with putting face plates on and getting the wires sorted in a central 'hub'. Should I just ask the electrician to run a cat5 cable to each room and putting a blank plate on it until we have some time on our hands? I assume I would also need to run a connection from the router to the 'hub'? (It would make most sense for the central location to be under the stairs which is also where the fuse box will be).

I personally am not sure this is worth it unless you are in to some serious networking in your home. So much is turning wireless. New TV we just got (and the blu ray player), both are wireless and hook up to the internet, no cables. Sky, for £10 you get a wireless extender so you don't need to put a phone cable in it anymore. Our central heating, the controller for that is wireless. Each to their own, but for us, I couldn't think of any possible use for ethernet in every room. Not long until everything is wireless imo.

ed110220

First of all an obvious MS question - is a full rewire necessary? Our 1940s house had some awful wiring from a safety, practical and aeasthetic point of view. In the kitchen was a socket that was plugged into a socket in the living room using a small appliance flex, cables run in surface mounted conduits that looked awful and too few sockets (also surface mounted and ugly).

However, the basic ring main and consumer unit were fine (probably replaced by the council some time in the 70s) so I didn't think any radical changes were necessary. Just buried the surface mounted cables in the walls when redecorating and added extra sockets either by opening up the ring or on spurs.

1940s wiring is quite distinctive, it has rubber rather than PVC insulation and the conductors appear to be steel rather than copper. I found some in the walls and loft, no longer live of course. I would be a little surprised if it was still in use.

While I was at it I put in two ethernet cables from a double socket in the living room next to the router to a socket near each PC upstairs - much faster and more reliable than wireless in a steel-framed house! I had never done ethernet before, but it was pretty easy.

Considering the cost and disruption of a full rewire, I'd want to be very sure it was necessary and that you couldn't get away with just removing the dodgy DIY additions and adding some extra sockets.

anotherginger

It is definitely necessary. The electrician has confirmed that the fuses in the old original box are live (as well as there being a newer consumer unit). When the wallpaper was removed we also found 'live' written all over the place!

We have just had a damp proof course done, so half the plaster downstairs has been removed anyway. We're not living in the property at the minute so they can make as much mess as they want. There will never be a better time.

Cost is important, but it's more important for the house to suit us. Anything we're doing is for our benefit only as we don't plan to sell.

Currently thinking the wired network is a step too far at the minute, so may go with the idea of just getting one connection wired upstairs run straight from the router.

ed110220

Happy-Days wrote: »

I personally am not sure this is worth it unless you are in to some serious networking in your home. So much is turning wireless. New TV we just got (and the blu ray player), both are wireless and hook up to the internet, no cables. Sky, for £10 you get a wireless extender so you don't need to put a phone cable in it anymore. Our central heating, the controller for that is wireless. Each to their own, but for us, I couldn't think of any possible use for ethernet in every room. Not long until everything is wireless imo.

Perhaps it is the house construction or I have been unlucky with wireless routers, but I've never found them satisfactory. Connection kept dropping and when watching streamed TV wirelessly it would often stop for a few seconds while buffering.

Putting in ethernet sockets is trivially easy and cheap if you've got the walls opened up, I got everything I needed - 50m of cable, three drywall back boxes, three ethernet faceplates and the crimping tool for less than 25 pounds. By far the trickiest part was threading the cable through in places where I wasn't opening up the walls, so if you're going to have walls chased anyway I'd definitely recommend it. Just individual cables from where the router will be to where the PC(s) will go.

ed110220

Another thing I just thought of is that it's very useful to have a 'spare' socket in a convenient place in each room for vacuuming because it's easy to plan a socket for each appliance/lamp location and then find you have to scrabble about under a table or other piece of furniture every time you get the vacuum cleaner out!

Much better to have at least one unused, 'exposed' socket (ie not behind furniture).

screwedagain

anotherginger wrote: »

Thanks, all food for thought!

I've included smoke/heat detectors in all downstairs rooms and the landing already. I'll check to see if there are any that also function as CO alarms.

What type of cable should I be asking for to run Virgin to other rooms? We don't have a tv aerial.

CO alarms are generally always standalone i.e. separate devices to smoke detectors. The 'action' you are supposed to take in the event of smoke detection (i.e. fire) is the opposite to what you want to do in a CO alarm situation, so you need different alarm tones (and therefore different devices usually) depending on what is being detected.

Be aware that you can get fire detectors that operate by detecting the level of CO in the area, but these are very sensitive and not designed to 'double up' as CO detectors for fuel burning appliances.

As for the ethernet cabling, all you are looking at at this stage really is the cost of the cable, which is pence per metre. Pick a spot that would be ideal for a future hub location (i.e. under the stairs, as you have suggested), and run a pair of cables from this point to each 'future' ethernet point in each room. You can get your electrician to coil the ends of the cables in a backbox at each location and cover with a blanking plate. You can then access the cables to properly terminate them into faceplates at a later date when required. I would also run a pair of double shielded coax cables to your hub location from your TV aerial and/or satellite dish location.

Are you likely to want to wall mount any TV's in any rooms? If so consider leaving a big enough wiring route for HDMI cables etc. from behind the TV to floor level so that you can easily connect DVD players/games consoles etc. in the future without a mess of exposed wires.

Finally, have you considered wiring provision for an intruder alarm, and/or CCTV? Might sound a little paranoid but you can get decent quality and discreet domestic CCTV systems for a few hundred quid. Generally the only wiring involved for IP based systems (where you can link to your PC/tablet/phone etc) is more ethernet cabling, so it would be easy to make provision for a future install.

The list is endless(!), the important thing at this stage I suppose if you don't want to get bogged down in too much technical detail is to try and make provision for future concealed wiring routes if possible (i.e. empty conduits with draw strings within walls and under floors etc), so that you can easily add things later on. A little thought at this stage will go a long way in the future.