House rewiring, done in stages if it suits you

How you know it is time

Around the inner north we see a lot of two things. Cloth-covered wiring in the period homes near High St and Ruckers Hill, and rubber-insulated wiring in anything built before roughly 1960. Rubber insulation goes brittle, cracks off the conductor and leaves bare copper sitting in the ceiling. You cannot see it from inside the house, which is exactly why it gets left.

The everyday signs are less dramatic. Lights that dim when the kettle goes on. A safety switch that trips for no obvious reason. Power points that only work sometimes, or feel warm. Two-pin points with no earth. A switchboard with ceramic fuses and no spare ways.

You may not need the whole house

This is the part other people will not tell you. A lot of what gets quoted as a full rewire is really a switchboard upgrade plus two or three circuits. If the original wiring was partly replaced during a kitchen or bathroom renovation, which is common in the half-renovated weatherboards around Station St, then a fair chunk of the work may already be done.

We check what is actually in the walls and the roof space before quoting. If a partial rewire does the job, that is what we will quote.

What a rewire involves

• New cabling run to power points, lighting and any dedicated circuits
• A new switchboard with circuit protection and safety switches on every circuit
• Proper earthing throughout, which older homes frequently do not have
• Making good as we go, and taking the rubbish with us
• A certificate of electrical safety when the work is signed off

Staging it so you can live in the house

A full rewire does not have to happen in one hit. We can do it in stages, usually the switchboard and the highest-risk circuits first, then the rest as it suits your budget. You get a plan for the whole job and a price for each stage, so nothing is a surprise later.

Heritage and period homes

Plenty of homes here have plaster, cornices and architraves worth protecting. We run cables through roof and subfloor space wherever we can rather than cutting into finished surfaces, and we talk through anything unavoidable before we do it.