Hi there, help appreciated on the following:
>
>My house is a small 2 bed Victorian terrace - rewired probably in the
>early 80s/late 70s.
>
>The good bit is that the kitchen has a dedicated circuit and there are
>direct spurs from the consumer unit to the cooker and central heating. >
>The bad bit is how power is fed from the sockets in the bedrooms to
>downstairs. The bedrooms are serviced by a ring and then two spurs lead
>from each bedroom to provide two sockets in both the dining room and
>living room (ie 4 sockets upstairs act as spurs to provide 4 sockets >dowstairs). >
>Two sockets each for the dining room and living room is totally
>inadequate so I've extension cables all over the place.
>
>What I'd like to do is to provide extra sockets downstairs by getting
>rid of the spurs and extending the upstairs ring main to include the
>living room and dining room - makes sense to me as usage of the bedrooms
>and the downstairs rooms is mutually exclusive and the bedroom sockets
>only ever provide power for table lamps and a couple of radios.
>
>Anyway, I've attached a couple of small (16K) pdfs that show the
>existing circuit and my proposed changes - any comments would be much >appreciated! >
>Best regards,
>
>Rob
It's certainly better to have this reorganised in a ring arrangement rather than the spurs that you have now.
It would be better still to have separate rings for upstairs and downstairs, even with a relatively small house.
Also, any sockets (usually on the ground floor) that could be used to plug in portable appliances used out of doors should be additionally protected using a 30mA RCD.
A good way to do this, assuming that you have space in the consumer unit, would be to re-organise it so that lighting circuit(s) and perhaps a specific spur for freezer and fridge (plus heating) are connected upstream of an RCD fitted in the consumer unit and circuit breakers for other circuits are downstream of it.