Partial house rewire advice

[ItsJustMeIGuess]

Hi all

I'm new here to the website so sorry for any errors or mistakes.

Just wondering if anyone has successfully done a partial house rewire before. If so - how did you do it?

I'm looking to gradually start renovating my mother's Victorian house. The house is still occupied, and I live there too. It's a larger property, 5 bedrooms.

We don't have the finances to do a complete rewire, let alone all the mess it would cause. The house has been in the family since my grandparents purchased it in the 50s. My mum is a single mum that's not been able to work due to family caring needs, so has likewise never had the finances to rewire along the way.

Even if we could just rewire the rooms we use the most, I'd fell much better. But I'm aware that's not always simple as cables can run through other rooms and could be connected all over the place, plus the fusebox would need upgrading, therefore essentially making a full rewire necessary. Bit of a headache really!

If anyone has managed a partial rewire I'd love the details of how it was done to work around your needs.

Many thanks!

Other half is a sparky. You can partially re-wire based on the ring mains in the house for the lighting circuits and the plug circuits. It could be this covers 3-5 rooms for example. You couldn’t just do a room by room rewire. It’s worth the getting an electrician in to look for you.

You’d need an electrical report to find out if the existing wiring can take a new consumer unit. If the wiring is pre 1960’s it’s unlikely to be good enough.

You might consider getting a new Consumer Unit with (say) space for 12 circuits for future work, then wiring (say) a kitchen, with plenty of sockets, cooker outlets, appliance switches.

Then sockets on ground floor

If you were having any new work done, that would go on the new CU. For example, should you want outside lights, a new circuit for those. Or an electric shower.

It will cost more than doing the whole house in one go

Remember that, with most circuits, you do not have to disconnect and remove the old, until the new is in place (this is more difficult with lighting)

Doing it this way it would make sense to have an RCBO for each new circuit as it went in, instead of sharing an RCD among several circuits. (RCBO is a superior installation)

A 1960's installation would probably have been done in PVC cable, which has a long life, but might possibly be done in rubber, which needs replacing. It is very likely that the lighting circuits do not have an earth, so you must not have metal switches or lamps. A circuit of that age may have had numerous DIY repairs and alterations, which may be unsatisfactory. There is a lot of labour in bringing old installations up to scratch, and probably not worth it. If you try to RCD protect your old circuits, they may already be faulty and suffer frequent trips. An electrical inspection will tell you.

Are you saying that the current wiring was done pre 1950s? If so I would ignore everything that is there and start again.

Given your description I'd employ an electrician and put it on a 0% credit card/similar if you're broke. There are ways of reducing cost and mess which can be mostly sorted afterwards if they know that's your plan (eg doing it in conduit and leaving enough slack to channel into walls later).

You'll need a new consumer unit. It might be possible to connect it between the meter and the current consumer unit (and put the current unit on a high fuse rcd).

If the wiring is that old I'd be very wary of running most modern appliances on it as they could easily overload the circuits and I'd get them onto the new consumer unit asap.

Also beware diagonal wires in the walls and in other weird places. Our first house had 1970s wiring and they'd hooked up a 3 bar electric fire to the lighting circuit on wire running through a copper pipe which used to supply the back boiler to the stove (which was bricked up behind the electric fire).

I don't know what electrical work might have included in the 50s but expect some surprises as you start changing things.

We had our house rewired last year while we lived here. The electricians did different parts of the house at different times. It probably took us about 6 months to have the whole thing done in stages, so it’s definitely possible.