Best way to get a light in under-stairs cupboard?

Turn each circuit off to identify the one feeding the alarm. The alarm panel will shout if it loses mains power, or will show a warning light. RTFM for details. When the alarm does this check everything else in the house, then write a proper label and stick it on the consumer unit. Assuming it turns up to be a power (not lights) circuit and once you are totally sure that the cable does indeed feed the (now mains-less) alarm, you could fit a (switched double?) 13A socket by cutting into the T & E. Then plug in a light of some sort. You should be able to pull enough slack out to make the fitting of the socket possible.

Bill

I've used these battery powered PIR LEDs for similar. Bright light, batteries last 6 months. Probably similar availsble more nearby.

I DIYed a light under the stairs in my last house. There was a circuit for the alarm in there as well, but I wanted to do it properly by taking it from a lighting circuit. Logically, it should have been the downstairs I took it from, but I could only really get access to that by ripping up flooring upstairs, and it was that ghastly chipboard stuff with interlocking tongue and groove, and was carpetted to boot.

So >

Fit glass stairs.

Colin Bignell

In article , Mark I recently moved into a house that has a decent sized understairs

If there is no FCU feeding the alarm, as their must be if a spur from a ring, it *should* be off a lighting circuit, if not on a dedicated radial. But switch off your MCBs one by one 'till you find out which one is the alarm circuit. Adding a light to that will be fine.

I had a recent issue similar to that where I wanted to take a feed from an existing circuit for an emergency light. I also wanted to fix a bodge of the previous owner which had left the light fitting downstairs unearthed. The complication was the terminations were all made in a junction in the ceiling void. The downstairs had a fancy plaster rose mounted round where the exit hole was, so hacking lumps out of that for access was not on. Upstairs was the aforementioned chipboard stuff.

In the end I found a relatively easy way, which was to fist get a long (400mm) 6mm drill bit, and drill up from the rose, through the floor above (I knew it would come out in a drying room above - but was not sure where exactly). The small bit meant that it would not make a mess of the carpet. One I was through I took the drill off the bit and left it there, and went upstairs to find the other end of it.

Then I folded back that corner of carpet and cut an access hole with a board access saw like the one shown here:

That then let me redo all the connections with wago terminals in boxes and add my new feed. It also allowed access for cable rods to get the new wire the 3m along the ceiling void to the new light position.