Loft wiring and consumer unit questions

[Mike]

Hi,

I want to add a couple of 5 foot double flourescent tube lights to my loft and at the same time to put in a few wall sockets. My long term plans are to do a proper loft conversion but at the moment I'm skint so I just want to use the space for storage and hobby use (I intend to put boards down myself after the wiring).

My understanding is that putting in new circuits like this needs Part P qualification so I need a pukka sparkie to do it for me, is this true? The other problem I have is that there are only 6 fuses in the consumer unit and so I think I will probably need a new one fitted to allow for the extra circuits.

I'm interested to know what people would estimate a Brighton sparkie would charge for this work ? (I am obviously going to get a few quotes in but am still interested to hear what I'm likely to be charged as a fair price). Also, I've looked around, and suitable CUs range from around =A330 (CPC) to say =A3100 (Screwfix). Are the expensive ones better than the cheap oes ? And are there any preferred makes that have good reliability and are generally recommended ?

Mnay thanks,

Mike

[Roger Mills]

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

[John Rumm]

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.

[meow2222]

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

NT

[Tim S]

[e-mail] 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

[Frank Erskine]

How would anyone know?

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 01:38:39 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be [e-mail] wrote this:-

[Roger Mills]

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?