House rewire - £3-5k fair?

jimmy_81

Hi folks,

In our ongoing saga of very painful household-related shocks (Fortunately financial not actually electrical... yet! :rotfl:) we've had an electrical safety inspection - and it turns out the best thing to do would be a full rewire.*

The electrician who inspected the place has asked us to have a really good think about where we'd like everything to go, sockets, switches etc. as he explained he can't really quote until he knows the extent of work required to move anything - seems reasonable. However - in his estimate it'll be between £3000 & £5000, depending on how many changes we require.

This is for a 4 bedroom semi-detached, with 2 reception rooms, single bathroom & kitchen, in West Berkshire.

So my question - does £3000 seem a reasonable starting price for a full rewire?

Many thanks for any advice! :T

* Just to answer the inevitable "But OF COURSE an electrician would tell you that" comments, a couple of extra points...

- We've recently had the floors up for central heating - and the wiring wasn't looking good So I'm inclined to agree with him...

- We could have the wiring done stage-by-stage but this would ultimately end up costing more, take longer & risk having to damage already-decorated areas, leading on to...

- Thanks to the heating work, the house is ALREADY in a mess & there's no carpets or flooring down anywhere. Now feels like the right time to rewire, so we can then get on with decorating!

asharon

I had some work done on a new property, I changed some sockets, added some, not a full rewire but a fair bit done and that was around £1600, so yours doesn't sound too off.

As per usual advice, work out all that you want and get 3 or 4 people in to quote and take it from there.

Quiet_Spark

£3K down here (London) would just about cover a 3 bed property for a standard rewire, so that sounds like a reasonable starting point to me.

jimmy_81

Thanks both for the helpful replies - much appreciated! :beer:

ds1980

Not advocating and it's not for everyone and a lot of sparks won't wanna know but I pretty much rewired (although a lot of the time it isnt actually a rewire thats required) our house myself and got a spark to finish up. Running cables is the time consuming bit and this is easy to do yourself if possible. I'm not 100% sure on regs anymore but they change so often if I ever got into bother I just said that how's we found them ;-). It isn't for everyone and your time may be better spent doing other things but I found I could save fortunes by doing things like chasing and fitting back boxes etc. this was also in a wreck so everything was up and accessible anyway. those figures seem reasoanble to me but no expert. Sorry in advance to the h&s crew along in a minute but remember the clues in the web address ;-).

NVRAM

the key here....
competent person.

As above tbh, back boxes, chasing wallas, runnign cables under the floor, whilst not technical are likely to be the most time consuming.

Recently had our bnox changed to a new one and had the spoarky connect up wiring we had done ourselves, he thoguth it was great that the time consuming bits had been done and the quality of the work.

A few reels of T+E of appropriate size and a fair few hours and you'll have all the cables redone yourself. Then pay the spark for connecting upto the fuse box, new box and reconnect should say maybe 250-500 depending where you are.

Bella73

We paid about £2500 to have a two bedroom bungalow totally re-wired earlier this year. Yes you can do the chasing yourself but we were happy for our electrician to do it for us.

The dust is horrific so we got ours done before we moved in, if you have that option it is the easiest way to do it.

jimmy_81

Thanks for the additional replies folks - much appreciated! :T

I did wonder about doing the grunt work myself... But if we go ahead with this it'll have to be done in the space of one week whilst we're also doing the bathroom. Delaying everything to the speed of my DIY skills doesn't feel like a very clever idea to me... :rotfl:

Unfortunately it's a clear case of trading money for time At least sounds like our sparky isn't completely taking the p*ss about the cost!

On the mess & dust; unfortunately we are all moved in - but would move back out for that week & shift at least some of our things to storage. Not really looking forward to that part, if I'm honest...

Cheers again for the replies!

abankerbutnotafatcat

Our house is a bit smaller - 3 bed, 2 receptions but we're in Surrey just outside London. We were verbally quoted c£3k for a like for like rewire with white fittings but when we finally got the written quotes for our detailed list including extra switches and sockets and all chrome fittings all three came in at c£5k.

dawyldthing

we paid 1400 for a full rewire in the East Midlands for a 2 bedroomed property so it does seem a lot, but it depends where you live in the country as to the cost

stindle

Had work done this week and found spark off one of them trade checker sites where you post a job, not mentioning which one. Had a few quotes and went with a company up North as the guy emailed me saying they were working this way for two weeks and could send one of there electricians over to take a look. We went with them as they were cheapest price tbh, i know cheapest isn't always best but in my case it actually was. They were fast, polite and gave us loads of advice. We ended up changing the old halogen flood lights for LED ones as the bulbs used to blow and i struggle with ladders. new lights look brilliant, would advise anyone to look at LED stuff if the tradesmen recommends it as we didn't know first thing about lighting before we were 'educated'. Anyway i will skip to the point, I was having general chit chat and the chap that worked on our property told me they do rewiring of 3 beds for under 2k and four beds under 2.5k including down south. Now considering they are from west yorks that's pretty cheap i would say based on sniffing around. I didn't tell them at the time but we are just about to push the button on a rental to get rewired and i never go into a gun fight with a knife as a general rule, can't be too careful with tradesmen these days can you? I think when the time comes I will be calling them as they are national (or work national) anyway. Have you seen London rates? $#%#$ rant over