Adding electric to a room

[darlingsweetpea]

Firstly I am not planning to do any of this work myself, I just want to know if it is possible.

I currently have two bathrooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. I want to make the downstairs bathroom into a utility room with a toilet. I'm planning to keep the toilet against the back wall and make it into its own little area. The rest of the room will become a utility room, plenty of room for washing machine, tumble dryer, freezer etc.

My question is as this is a bathroom it has no power sockets, so how do I get electricity in the room. I do not have an attic as I live in a converted bungalow so I only have eaves. The room directly above the downstairs bathroom is the upstairs bathroom, which also has no power and a tiled floor.

Thank you in advance for your tips.

Get an electrician round.
They do this type of work every day and can look at your actual scenario, advise what needs to be done and the disruption/damage to decor etc that may/may not occur.

An electrician will be able to advise better, but you should be able to extend the circuit from existing plug sockets.

It'll be messy though. They'll need to cut chases in walls for the wiring and will need to lift floorboards upstairs/make holes in the ceiling downstairs to run the cabling.

This will be a straightforward job for any sparky, and needn’t cause a huge mess. If I were looking at it I’d potentially spur off a nearby socket, but that would depend entirely on the circuit and whether that socket was already a spur / the total load. Other solution would be running a new circuit from your consumer unit and installing whatever plugs and switches you’d like.

There might be some chasing of wires into wall, but for plug sockets at a skirting board kind of level this will easily be patched up with some pollyfiler or similar. Cost wise, we paid £550 in London last year for a new 32amp circuit run into the kitchen to put our new oven and a few other things on.

Normally anything is possible.

The issue is how much it will cost/how much disruption it will cause.

For example it sounds like you will have a lot of high power devices in that room, so an electrician may want to install a separate circuit. If your consumer unit has room and there is a clear and easy to implement route then it might be cheap. If your consumer unit doesn't have room, and it is a long tortuous path to the room, then it could get expensive as you will be replacing the consumer unit at the same time.

The only way to find out is to get a couple of people in to look at the job and quote.

Thank you for all your replies, it is really helpful. Now I know it is possible in some way I will ask an electrician round.

6 years ago we had a brand new consumer unit put in for both our extensions so hopefully it'll have space. The distance from the main unit to the utility room is about 3 meters....so there is hope this won't cost an arm and a leg!

It's pretty easy to tell whether the consumer unit has space. You can see the RCD,s, then if there is space there are plastic blanking panels fitted that can be popped out to put new RCDs in - it should be obvious.

New regs I think specify metal rather than plastic consumer units - a lot of the older ones are plastic. These are not mandatory I believe, but some electricians will recommend upgrading them if they are making significant changes to an existing consumer unit. It's a way in which some jobs can be padded. To be fair a metal consumer unit is a safer option which is why the changes came in. It's just not always 100% necessary.