General > General Technical Chat
UK electrical wiring
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IanB:

--- Quote from: james_s on February 14, 2021, 12:36:06 am ---You certainly wouldn't see anything like that out here in earthquake territory. Looks like it would pose a far greater resistance to fire than the wood houses we have though. Seems like a really easy way to wire a home like that would be to run conduit from box to box and plaster over that.

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Traditional homes in Britain were built as shown above with brick outer walls and "breeze block" inner walls and dividing walls. It gives the whole house a much more solid feel with better soundproofing. Newer homes are generally timber framed with brick outer facing to protect against the elements but wooden studded inner walls with plasterboard, because it is faster and cheaper to construct that way. However, if you build your own home and pay the builder to do it how you want it you can readily have an all-brick house.

I am rather curious about the best way to rewire a 1960's brick home, since cutting channels in the wall to bury the new cable seems to be too expensive/too much trouble for contractors to contemplate. Now if they had built the house in the first place with buried conduit, it would just be a matter of pulling new cable through in place of the old...

BTW, not many people have died from earthquakes in the UK. I think there has been maybe one casualty in the last few hundred years when a roof tile landed on his head.
Monkeh:

--- Quote from: IanB on February 14, 2021, 12:55:31 am ---I am rather curious about the best way to rewire a 1960's brick home, since cutting channels in the wall to bury the new cable seems to be too expensive/too much trouble for contractors to contemplate.

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Being that it's the normal method of construction here, it's quite normal to deal with chasing out the plaster and a little brick if needed. The other option is surface trunking, which is cheap, fast, and ugly, and how pretty much every council home will have been done.
james_s:

--- Quote from: IanB on February 14, 2021, 12:55:31 am ---I am rather curious about the best way to rewire a 1960's brick home, since cutting channels in the wall to bury the new cable seems to be too expensive/too much trouble for contractors to contemplate. Now if they had built the house in the first place with buried conduit, it would just be a matter of pulling new cable through in place of the old...

BTW, not many people have died from earthquakes in the UK. I think there has been maybe one casualty in the last few hundred years when a roof tile landed on his head.

--- End quote ---

I've never heard of an earthquake in the UK, I haven't looked it up but I don't think it's very common at all there. Here on the West coast of the US they are a frequent occurrence though. Most are not of sufficient magnitude to be felt but every few years there's a small but noticeable tremor and usually every 30 years or so there's one large enough to cause some damage so it's a concern here. If not for that then brick and concrete would be very appealing for the reasons you mention.

Cutting channels in plaster could be accomplished in a few minutes with an appropriately configured router and filling them in would be no harder than patching the holes that are necessary for fishing new wires through existing studded walls. That sort of thing is never permissible here for line voltage wiring but I've done it a few times for low voltage network cables as there are much less stringent requirements for low voltage. Proper conduit is fantastic and a dream to work with but rarely seen in domestic environments except in garages and unfinished basements some jurisdictions require conduit for those areas where the wiring is otherwise exposed. If I were wiring a whole house from scratch though I'd be really tempted to do the whole thing with rigid galvanized conduit and the big spacious metal boxes with mud rings like they use in commercial buildings. My mother's house was owned by a commercial electrician and he wired the additions that way and it has been a real pleasure to work on compared to what I'm used to.
iainwhite:

--- Quote from: gnuarm on February 13, 2021, 05:02:55 pm ---I think my idea of skirting is not like yours.  Perhaps you can explain what that is. 

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Skirting = Baseboard
Monkeh:

--- Quote from: james_s on February 14, 2021, 01:09:20 am ---
--- Quote from: IanB on February 14, 2021, 12:55:31 am ---I am rather curious about the best way to rewire a 1960's brick home, since cutting channels in the wall to bury the new cable seems to be too expensive/too much trouble for contractors to contemplate. Now if they had built the house in the first place with buried conduit, it would just be a matter of pulling new cable through in place of the old...

BTW, not many people have died from earthquakes in the UK. I think there has been maybe one casualty in the last few hundred years when a roof tile landed on his head.

--- End quote ---

I've never heard of an earthquake in the UK, I haven't looked it up but I don't think it's very common at all there. Here on the West coast of the US they are a frequent occurrence though. Most are not of sufficient magnitude to be felt but every few years there's a small but noticeable tremor and usually every 30 years or so there's one large enough to cause some damage so it's a concern here. If not for that then brick and concrete would be very appealing for the reasons you mention.

--- End quote ---

There have been 25 recorded in the last 50 days. At least four of them felt. None sufficient to bother anything built properly.
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