How do you know if a house needs rewiring

[midnightOK]

Is there anyway to tell if a house needs rewiring by looking at the electricity box only? Thanks

I think no, but I am not an electrician.

also, not sure what you mean by "needs". Someone tried that with me when I was selling a property, told me it "needed" rewiring and that they wanted a price reduction.

I said no. Everything worked perfectly and had passed electrical inspection when rented out a few years prior.

No you would need an electrician to take a look. Our purchase looked ok but the electrician was horrified and said it was deadly!

I would be worried about being told it needed rewiring from someone who stood to benefit from getting the rewiring job.

If the fuse box is old and there are old light switches and plug sockets that would tell you but you cant always tell from looking. Also if the house has very old decor like 30 years old plus that probably indicates wiring could do with being updated.

New fuse boards are metal and no wiring will be red and black but more modern blue and brown and earth

We’ve had a few houses that have needed rewiring. Generally a sign is if the lights flicker when you turn something else in the house on (circuit overloaded), fuse board tripping regularly, plugs and sockets looking visibly very old (not just yellowed). Really though you should ask an honest electrician- they’ll be able to run tests and tell you. Just because a house is older though it doesn’t necessarily mean it needs rewiring - our current house is 1950s and I’m not sure if / when it’s ever been rewired but we’ve had a proper inspection and it’s all good.

You can get an EICR - Electrical Installation Condition Report. This is a lot more than just looking at the consumer unit (fuse box).

Beware of cowboys, a properly done check will take at least half a day, but it will tell you everything that wrong compared to current regulations and grade it from critical to nice-to-have.

Best approach is to get one person to do the EICR and another to do the work, to ensure that you don't get taken advantage of.

I have a house built in the early 1980s, a few years ago I needed a new consumer unit but the wiring was fine.

Thanks all, really appreciate all your help.

You can tell if a house definitely will need rewiring by looking at the fuse box.

You can't be certain it won't need rewiring just by looking at the fuse box - we have a perfectly modern fuse box but uncovered some horrors when we were putting in a new kitchen which necessitated a partial rewire

Needing s full rewire is not really a definitive thing, unless it has say really old 1950s style rubber cable that hasn't been touched since then & is all disintegrated, bur that's very few houses thst will almost certainly be for sale as 'requiring refurb'

Everything beyond that is basically interpretive.

As others said rubber wiring is an absolute must to re wire but that always generally pre 1950
a good electrician will tell u but careful as wiring spec changes so often
there a difference between dangerous and not upto spec

ours was required in the 70’s been checked not upto current standards but not unsafe so we’ve left it

Unless your house is a burnt out shell, there's no quick look that tells you a rewire is needed.
A proper inspection (EICR) will have a spark take socket fronts off, inspect wiring and accessories, and conduct measurements with a meter to determine the condition of the wiring. That will take several hours as pp has said.
(Even that won't uncover all hidden horrors but it's the best that can be done without tearing up all floorboards and tearing holes in walls.)
Beware of any spark (cowboy) who walks in the door, sucks air through his teeth and tells you it all needs rewiring. It's not as straightforward as that.
There may be cases where the installation is so old that even though it's perfectly sound, it's not fit for purpose (only one socket in each room for example, or no sockets at all in a bedroom). In that case a full or partial rewire may be the most efficient way of getting what you want but that will come down to personal preference rather than safety.

I was convinced (aka something else to needlessly worry about) that my 1903 house needed a rewire after I bought it. I got a qualified electrian in to fix a few obvious things replace the consumer unit and do an EICR. We passed, and overall verdict was there's a mixture of wiring ranging from 2000s to 1960s, but no rewire urgently needed. This is from an electrician who liked doing work for us, came back when he didn't have to and a part rewire would have been in his interests financially. I'm not doubting a part upgrade is needed at some point, but its not urgent, no flickering, no tripping, all good.

A lot of the comments of this thread are reassuring too.

We’ve just had a full rewire on our new house. The fuse box had old fuses that could be rewired (I think that was the phrase) and was visibly aged and we had quite a lot of old style plugs without switches on them so we were pretty confident it needed doing.

The price difference between a partial rewire and full was about 1k if that so we went for a full rewire. It was the right choice because the electrician found uncapped live wires in the walls when he was doing it and we had some wiring with cracked rubber in various spots around the house!!

We plan to live there for a very long time so I’m glad I can have peace of mind that it’s wired properly and safe now.

If it's safety you're worried about, then you need a pro to check it. If you just want to date it, if it has fuses (the sort you pull out and put new wire in if they blow) it's ancient. And though not necessarily dangerous in itself, not as safe as a modern board with switches. Subtle difference, there. If the wiring has round-pin sockets, or is cotton-covered, then it definitely needs rewiring!

Beyond the safety aspct, he question of whether a house 'needs' rewiring is subtle. And your lender may have a view on it as well as you. We had a lender insisit on a rewire even though our electrician said it didn't- because it didn't meet current regs- which were all of 6 months old at the time.🙄We pointed out that their office, which we were sitting in at the time, woud also not meet the regs....
This house we rewired because of various things, such as, it had wire fuses, like many older systems very few power points, and the lighting wasn't earthed (so you can't use metal switches), and the consumer unit was in a dangerous and not very accessible place.

We're in the midst of renovations and are having a full rewire primarily because there are barely any sockets in the house - one double per room mostly. So it didn't 'need' it from a safety point of view, but from a day to day perspective it will make a massive difference, and as all the walls need skimming anyway it's minimal extra mess.

How much does a rewire cost roughly?

We were quoted £18k for the full rewire of a 4 storey Georgian townhouse, 8 main rooms plus bathrooms, utility etc.

18k that's an awful lot to find. I could have started this thread myself. We seem to have a lot of flickering and the occasional tripping. Was also concerned like pp's that you need to ask someone to advise who might benefit from telling you that you need it.

It'll be less if you live in a sensibly sized house. This one was a family probate property about 3 years ago and we just sold up in the end.

Flickering and tripping aren't good signs. We had a light that kept tripping the circuit and it turned out it was short circuiting so badly that it had singed the loft insulation above. The electrician said we were lucky the whole house hadn't gone up in flames.

Absolutely this.

@SamShortForSambuca yeah definitely a lot smaller than that! Will get looking into one of those reports.

Old fittings can loosen contacts over time, this can cause flickering which in turn can cause a trip. If it's a light bulb just start by changing the bulb, in anything older than 20 years the lighting circuit would have been designed to work with 60 or 100 watt bulbs. Modern 10 watt bulbs shouldn't overload it at all.

@Daftasabroom we seem to need to change bulbs quite often and I don't think that should be necessary nowadays? We've been in the house 5years and the house is 1930's but don't know when everything would have last been looked at.

We had this and it was actually a problem with the supply to the house, not the wiring in our house. We had an electrician round who then made me call the National Grid, who then came out at 5 pm on. January evening and fixed it.
Definitely worth checking.
And all the neighbours flickering and tripping stopped too.