Loft wiring and consumer unit questions

Can't you extend existing lighting and power circuits? Then it probably wouldn't be notifiable, and your existing CU would be ok.

Not exactly. You could do the work yourself, however if you do any jobs that are "notifiable" under part P then you would need to submit a building notice to your local authority first. How it plays from there will vary on how close to the rules the LA sticks. In theory there should be no additional cost to you (over the £100 ish for the building notice) - however theory is often not played out in reality.

The alternative approach would be to just do it anyway and ignore it, since when you do the full loft conversion you will need a full plans submission (posh building notice) for that anyway and could include any wiring on that.

Often loft conversions just extend the existing upstairs circuits. For the moment that may be your best bet. Personally I would prefer to add dedicated circuits.

A CU swap is unlikely to be less than £350...

Stick to a recognised brand with a good presence in the domestic accessories market (Contactum, Hager, MK, Wylex) and you will be fine. Reliability is good, and parts are freely available (and in many cases interchangeable).

Some of the bundle packs of CU and MCBs that you see crop up can be good value even if you need to augment the pack with a few extra bits bought separately.

from latest data it turns out less than 0.1% of diy work is notified.

NT

snipped-for-privacy@care2.com coughed up some electrons that declared:

That's less than I made it when I looked at Maidstone's data. Which data are you looking at?

Ta

Tim

How would anyone know?

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 01:38:39 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@care2.com wrote this:-

Is that 0.1% of *notifiable work, or of *all* work - much of which may not be notifiable?

And, like someone else said, how is this measured?