Electrical Wiring Prices

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The cost of having your house rewired by a professional electrician depends can vary considerably depending on how many fittings you require, the layout and size of the house and ease of access (particularly if rewiring). Nonetheless, it is of course possible to give some idea of the range of prices you can expect to pay for wiring, perhaps more so than for smaller electrical jobs which depend more on the specific location.

The cost in terms of fittings can be broken down into different sections some of which will only apply if you have a new house and others only if you are having the wiring replaced.

Connection Fee's

If you are having a new house built you will probably need to have it connected to the grid - unless you plan on working off a generator.  This is one area that really can screw your average costings. It can vary enormously in price depending on how easy the connection is. You may pay as little as £500, £5k or even £20k all depending on your circumstances. A little bit (actually quite a lot as its difficult to find info on) of Internet searching for what other people have paid suggests that a figure of £1000-1500 is fairly typical with most installations <£5k. However, it is advisable that this is considered before the plot is bought as the utility (electricity plus water, gas and phone) connection fee's could add considerably to the overall building costs and ruin your budget.

Consumer Units

Many older people still refer to these as fuse boxes which is technically incorrect but we all know what it means. They are the point in the house where the electricity supply (put in at great expense) is split into different isolated circuits e.g. sockets, lighting, cooker, central heating. They are described as n-way where n is the number of circuits. Each of these circuits is protected against overload by its own miniature circuit breaker (MCB) which can cost £4-5 each in materials. There will also be a main switch (for the whole supply) and there is likely to be an RCD (residual current detector) although this may be in a separate box. An RCD will detect leakage current to earth (a potential fault scenario) and very quickly switch off the supply, hopefully preventing a serious or fatal electric shock. However, you can still be killed messing around with electricity in the home! Both RCD's and MCB's can be reset after a fault via a small button next to them. The RCD (along with the mains switch) will often be included in the consumer unit itself. A split unit allows some of the circuits to be on the RCD and some not. Why good is that? Well your freezer going off when on holiday due a minor fault elsewhere would be irritating (RCD's are sensitive) but you would be advisable to have the shower circuit on the RCD for obvious safety reasons. Consumer units cost between £40-150 depending on whether they come with MCB's, the number of ways, RCD's, maximum loading etc. To install a consumer unit including materials and labour will according to our surveys cost on average £341 per item/job (as of May 11, 2008).

Lighting and sockets

This work includes all the lights (pendants or any other fixtures you want) and switches including for example having two-way switches at the bottom an top of the stairs. Simple pendants and switches can be bought from as little as £1 but of course fancier designs and different materials (brass for example) will cost more. The actual fitting cost varies depending on the circumstances (length of wire run, how near to the ring main) but our current average is £60 per item/job (as of May 11, 2008) for adding a socket to an existing wiring installation. The price per socket for a new house can be considerably cheaper at between £30-40 per socket again depending on finish. Adding light is similar in cost to a socket - again depending on the quality of the finish. So for both one may estimate a little over an hours work, including travel time, setting up, tidying up if you are adding a new socket or light fitting on average plus the cost of the fittings. In a new build this time would of course be reduced.

Additional Items

There are loads of miscellaneous items/jobs around the house that need doing smoke detectors, bathroom fans, kitchen extractors, showers, pumps, central heating circuits, shaver points, burglar alarms and of course TV sockets. It's worth thinking about how much extra cost and hassle it will be to add features to the house later rather than now if you're in the fortunate (hopefully) position of building your own house. So for example don't skimp on double rather than single sockets as the material cost different is minimal.

Overall cost of wiring or rewiring?

Our current average prices for wiring and re-wiring your home are listed in the table below. If you require more details please click on the link on the left hand side column which will take you to a more detailed page.