Adding a new ceiling light?

I'd like to replace my 'standard' centrally-located ceiling light in the lounge with a set of these more modern mains-voltage (no transformer) halogen units, to be located about 7' (2m) away.

After reading a 'How to...' pamphlet from Homebase, I'm reasonably confident I can tackle the electrical wiring (electronics is my hobby). But I can't begin to see how I can gain access to achieve this. Does it amount to the major project of removing furniture, carpet and underlay from the areas upstairs (possibly in two bedrooms), above the old and new lamp locations? Never having raised a floorboard in my life, that sounds extremely daunting!

This of course assumes I've ruled out the simple but unsightly approach of running plastic cable conduit across the lounge ceiling.

Is one other alternative conceivably possible, namely cutting a hole in the new location and somewhow from that extremely limited access stretch the necessary extra wires between old and new locations? How would I go about that, even assuming the wooden beams (joists?) behind the plaster were running conveniently in the right direction? How do professionals tackle such jobs?

Any advice would be much appreciated please.

Reply to
Terry Pinnell
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You need to find out which way the joists are running by lifting your carpet and seeing which way the floor boards are fitted - the joists will run at right angles to them.

In a typical lounge the joist will span the shortest dimension and you are likely to need to drill every one along where you will run the cable. But if they are not, then you may be able to thread the cable through a small hole as you mention - unless there are some timber noggins between the joists!

dg

Reply to
dg

That's good, but I wouldn't rely on Homebase as my sole source of information.

It's worth getting a good DIY book like the Collins one....

This is one way to do it. If you have floorboards, it isn't too bad.

Older houses may even have floorboards without tongues and grooves along the sides, and if you look in the room above, you may even find that a board or two have been up before, especially if electricity was installed or rewiring done after the house was built.

If floor boards have tongues and grooves, you will need a circular saw to cut along the tongues. The blade should be set to approximately

75% of the depth of the board and you cut along each side of the one that you want to remove, then with the blade at full depth but no more, across it at a joist. Look for nail holes and cut near them.

A word of warning here. Electricians are supposed to drill through the joists at least 50mm down and thread the cables through. Some are lazy and notch the joists placing the cables immediately under the floorboards. This is obviously dangerous if you are using a circular saw. Use a cable detector before you start.

If the floor is chipboard, which is the case on newer houses, it is harder to cut out accesses neatly. One way is to cut out a panel using a circular saw, or more neatly a jig saw. To make good, you can fasten timber battens under the hole - screwing to the existing floor, drop the removed piece back and screw that to the battens.

A much neater solution if you have a router is to use a Trend Routabout, which allows you to cut access ports in the floor and has inserts to make them good afterwards.

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>This of course assumes I've ruled out the simple but unsightly

You should rule that out.

This would be possible. If the house is older, and the ceiling is lath and plaster, this is not to be recommended, because making good is not very easy.

If the ceiling is plasterboard, then you can cut a hole and make it good, again by refitting the cut out piece supporting with battens and using filler, but it is pretty hard to make it invisible, so the end result may mean reskimming the ceiling with plaster. If you happen to have Artex, it can be made good easily.

For any of the methods, you will need some kind of fish wire.

e.g.

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a steel one.

If the joists run perpendicular to the way that you want to go, then the upstairs method becomes mandatory unless you want to make an access hatch near each joist to allow a hole to be drilled through it.

To be honest, in the long run, working from above is going to be easier and less making good..

.andy

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Reply to
Andy Hall

Easier just to tap on the ceiling from below to find which way they run!

To be honest - it might just be do-able to do it without taking up floorboards if you were lucky, but my suggestion would be that as a beginner you'd be much better off doing it that way. What you're proposing is a bit like 'keyhole surgery' - something most surgeons don't think about doing until they are very well practiced at opening the patient up from chin to abdomen and exposing all the organs so they can see what they're doing and do something wrong..... get my drift?!

David

Reply to
Lobster

Excellent replies - thanks all, especially for this comprehensive practical guidance from Andy.

I have to confess though that my initial apprehension has been if anything increased! I think the next step will be a tentative exploration under a section of upstairs carpet. Unless that stimulates my confidence, I may well settle eventually for a few halogens in the existing, central location...

Reply to
Terry Pinnell

I think that that makes sense.

Once you know what the upstairs flooring is, then you will know what's involved.

How old is the house, and do you have any feeling as to how old the wiring and electrical fittings are?

.andy

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Reply to
Andy Hall

Take heart, Terry: learning to lift floorboards, do tricks with fish tape (for which semi-stiff offcuts of cable, or steel measuring tape, can often be effectively substituted) is the major part of a domestic electrician's skill - being able to work out cable routes which don't take too long to implement or require too much making good is, I imagine, key to making small domestic works pay, by turning them around in a short time. Your advantage over the jobbing professional is that you have just one house to learn the quirks of, and can accumulate knowledge of how that property's been built.

As Andy's said, the royal road is working in the room above: that'll give you the best view of how the cables currently run. You won't need to move the furniture right out, just push it away from the part of the room you're working in so you can roll back the carpet. Assuming it's a fitted carpet, it'll unhook easily enough off the gripper rods - they're full of little nails pointing at 45degrees towards the skirting board, so lifting the carpet means pulling it in a counterintuitive direction, i.e. towards the skirting board, at the same time as lifting it. The first bit's awkward, but once you've made a start, maybe close to a corner, the rest comes up almost like undoing a zip.

If you've got Ye Olde Floorboards, then - as Andy suggests - you may well strike lucky and find some which've been cut, lifted, and relaid. (If you're *very* lucky and have had it done by a forward-thinking d-i-y'er, the lifted baords will have been held down at the end of the job with screws, rather than nails, which makes relifting even simpler.) Although a circular saw makes cutting through tongue-n-groove easy (if a bit spectacular), I've never had one while owning floorboarded houses. Using an existing board end as starting point is a win; but if there's no board end close to where you need, in my younger more impoverished days I'd cut across boards over the middle of a joist (you can tell by the nail lines) by drilling a line of 2-3mm diam holes next to each other (the inside of a bit of electrical terminal block makes a fine bodger's depth stop: boards are typically 20mm or 7/8" thick), joining the holes with a mixture of angled drilling and gentle chiselling (don't put sideways pressure on the drill bit, it snaps embarassingly easily); in the houses I've had, the boards are old, dry, and gappy enough that the tounge snaps through easily enough. These days I'd use a cut-down jigsaw blade (in a jigsaw, naturally!)

Lifting itself involves a cold chisel or similar to lever the bleeder up; sometimes working it up and pushing it back down a few times will raise the nailheads up high enough so you can grab them with a pair of pliers/nail-pullers/mole-wrench, so you can pull them out; sometimes you just keep levering and get that end of the board up high enough to get you started. Once one end is up, the rest of the board is easy to lift, by sliding your cold chisel/other bit of strong metal under from the now-lifted end, and using the board's own flexibility to lift the nails.

If it's chipboard, the sheets are much bigger, and it doesn't shrink the way boards do, so the tounge-n-groove holds firmer, and you need to cut access holes in the way Andy describes (you might just be lucky and find someone's been there before you, but that's less likely in a newer build where chip's been used for flooring). In the place I now have (1980s built timber-frame), I've cut holes using both the methods Andy describes - plunging cut with a circular saw, and starter holes with a wood-boring spade bit at the four corners joined up with a jigsaw. For the latter, it's worth cutting/snapping a blade so it doesn't go down too much deeper than the 20mm or so of chipboard depth, to reduce chances of slicing into cable or pipe lower down. Keeping the cut edges neat makes it feasible, even easy, to refit the cutout piece, resting it on battens retained by screws from above.

Getting wire from existing point to final without raising boards might work, but is chancy: you'll only be able to work in the direction the joists run, it's highly unlikely you'll get from one room to another that way, and chimney-breasts (even ones now removed) are just one reason for cross-pieces appearing where you don't want them. All that said, it's not impossible in many cases to push a Suitable Something, e.g. a piece of 6mmsq or 10mmsq earthing cable you bought a full reel of (2.5mmsq twin-and-earth can work, too) from Here to There. Tying the ends of bits of string to small children or cats and hoping they'll reappear at the other source of light is considered poor form ;-) and shooting light string only works in the promotional videos for the tool wot does that in suspended ceiling voids (where lifting ceiling tiles from underneath is scarcely a mjor difficulty anyway). The return on investment on learning board-lifting is generally better!

Hope that helps, and encourages - Stefek

Reply to
Stefek Zaba

Reply to
Grunff

Snip>

It can be if it a temporary arrangement pending doing the job properly on redecoration.

I have done this in our kitchen extension - flat roof and no access into roof space from upstairs adjoining bathroom.

But it was a right palaver, moving furniture and lifting boards is much easier.

Nest time I take on a rewire etc. I'll probably invest, but so I've managed quite well with lengths of old cable, galvanised wire and a 'fishing' hook - a large hook fashioned from stiff wire, attached to the end of a bit of plastic UPVC quadrant trim (nice and flexible)

Indeed.

I usually use the jigsaw and snapped off blade for cutting tongues nowadays, but have also used the circular saw as well.

Note that you don't have to lift that many boards - if you have to run the cable perpendicular to the joists then obviously you need to lift a couple of boards along th route.

To run a cable across a room parallel with the joists one or two boards would probably suffice - you can fish it across the void without to much difficulty usually (solid noggin are the main potential problem

Reply to
chris French

Yes, it's one of these things that is a fair investment to buy, as compared with just cutting the chipboard or plywood away.

On the other hand, I had a blitz at it and put in three or four accesses per room and finished the job quickly and neatly. Cut the hole, drop in insert, replace plug and done. Doesn't rock either.

I had one floor to do with floorboards, which is not really mentioned in connection with the routabout. It was still easy though. I positioned the template so that it straddled two boards and cut. I got two pieces from the centre of course. I glued these together and put a small piece of wood on the back as well. Works well.

.andy

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Reply to
Andy Hall

Wouldn't have helped us much, because much of the floor boards and all of the ceilings had to come out anyway, but ideal for chipboard floors. Definitely one for the bookmarks.

Reply to
Grunff

In article , chris French wrote, re drawink cables through awkward places:

Mini trunking lids are quite good too, I usually pull a length of stout string through along with the cable and leave it there for posterity. Very useful if you ever install another circuit which passes through the same area.

Reply to
Mike Clarke

Thanks. It's only 17 years old.

Reply to
Terry Pinnell

It sure does, Stefek, that's very kind of you. That goes straight in my new DIY file! I will have a crack at it soon.

Reply to
Terry Pinnell

Probably chipboard then. Have a look in somewhere like the airing cupboard or under the bath.

.andy

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Reply to
Andy Hall

Glad it helped. Now I need to tame Mozilla so that it doesn't lie to me

- I was sure I'd snipped the you-n-Andy dialogue before contributing my own deathless prose, but here at work good old tin shews Mozilla thought I wanted it to post the previous exchange, all gequotenabulated, before the "real" reply.

Sigh. Oh, for the days of TECO ;-)

Reply to
stefek.zaba

I bet you use EMACS as well :-)

.andy

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Reply to
Andy Hall

You can always use the cat and fish method. Or the modern equivalent, the radio controlled car with a bit of string attached.

Christian.

Reply to
Christian McArdle

Yes and no: I've never really become an EMACS-head, though it may yet happen (as it would allow my fingers to do almost-the-same things whien composing text under all of Linux, BSD, Windoze, and even OpenVMS. But I got seduced by Ved, the programmable differently-ideological visual editor which came with Poplog (fine interactice programming environment incorporating POP-11, CommonLisp, and Prolog, originating at Sussex and these days available for Linux as a freebie) and that's the one in which I invested headspace in (ob d-i-y ;-) customising - where the effort is not so much in learning the particular programming language (though I've written non-trivial amounts of POP-11, so the Ved customisation language was familiar enough) as in learning the organising principles, abstraction model, and names of commonly-needed variables/routines. And I know just enough vi to be dangerous on any *nix machine, so the need to get my head around Emacs has always been below the do-it threshold. Under Windows my text-creation tool of choice is UltraEdit - not free but cheap and well-supported by its author, and able to do whole-directory search-n-replace (that being the reason I first bought it).

For all these environments, it's almost always the case that I write any long and/or public-consumption document in a "real" text-only editor first, and then (if I have to ;-) cut-n-paste into one of those "word processor" things which offers hours of endless distraction with fancy formatting options which nearly-but-not-quite work as advertised...

Stefek

Reply to
Stefek Zaba

"Stefek Zaba" wrote | For all these environments, it's almost always the case that | I write any long and/or public-consumption document in a "real" | text-only editor first, and then (if I have to ;-) cut-n-paste | into one of those "word processor" things which offers hours | of endless distraction with fancy formatting options which | nearly-but-not-quite work as advertised...

I've just started on an "attempt to teach myself (La)TeX" idea. Also playing with Lyx which is a graphical front end to (La)Tex. Unfortunately doesn't seem (on Windows at least) to actually work with .tex files.

Currently using

MikteX

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Editor ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/pub/tex/systems/win32/winshell/WinShell25.exe

Lyx

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provides hours of endless distraction without the fancy formatting options :-)

comp.text.tex is thataway ----| | | ----->

Owain

Reply to
Owain

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