Hello,
Is there a rule that you should re-wire a house every x years, and if so, what is x?
The wiring in our house is, I presume, the original from the 1970s. Rather than run T&E to the lamps, the builders/electrician has used conduit cable. The electrician that visited told us he hadn't seen anything like it, though he was younger than the house!
The problem is that in the 1970s we didn't have pcs, dvds, etc and all the sockets were put onto one 32A ring main. To be fair that's not a problem under normal use but other houses we have lived in have had two ring mains; usually one for upstairs and one for downstairs or one for front and one for back of the house.
Recently I was working on the CH during a cold spell, so we had a couple of fan heaters on. The problem was that a couple of 3kW fan heaters and a kettle, left little room for anything else, so the mcb tripped once or twice.
The CH is up and running now, so hopefully we will not need the fan heaters for a while, but it would be nice to divide the ring main into two. I think it would be useful to divide the ring logically, e.g. all upstairs on one; all downstairs on another (incidentally they did this with the lights, so why no the sockets?). I don't suppose this is possible? I suppose the ring main lies between the up and downstairs floors and drops down into the ground floor rooms and up to the upstairs alternately? Would I have to settle for a front of house/back of house divide?
Is it just a matter of disconnecting one end of the ring and then disconnecting at different sockets to see which are powered or is there any easier way to trace the ring main?
Once it is split in half, is it just a matter of adding a new T&E tail to each half, back to the CU to convert the two radials into two rings?
Thanks.