Category Archives: Electrics

Assuming that I have any left, regular readers will know that I have been rewiring my own house. This has taken me to corners of the cavity underneath the floorboards and the attic which I’d rather not have been. The attic is covered in glass wool loft insultation. Horrible stuff. It gets all over you and itches. I’m a big fellow. Some of the spaces I’ve worked in have been very small. It’s hard to show this with a photograph because I’m always jammed in the space and there isn’t someone else to take the shot. Until the work is safe, I can’t let anyone else in the house.

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This humble hole leads to a box cavity above my shower. The shower is lit by a pesky downlight. I hate downlights now. I’d have them banned. They don’t work as well as other room lights which throw the light around. They generate lots of heat, which makes them a substantial fire risk (necessitating all sorts of other remedial strategies) and they are devilishly fiddly to install. I’ve changed my lighting plan considerably to abandon the inclusion of any further downlights. I’ll probably sell the others on ebay though that makes me feel guilty for perpetuating the bloody fad. That’s what they are: a fad which has got completely out of hand. In the future, they’ll be regarded as embarassing and people will be baffled about why so many householders installed them, in the same way that leylandii trees are now seen. Garden decking will also suffer this fate.

The hole above is only just wide enough for me to insert an arm into. I had to lie, face down into the ancient glass wool loft insulation (that’s the brown stuff you can see), stretched across the rafters, with my left arm completely inserted into the cavity and feel around until I found the cutout for the shower light, to feed the cable through. I am right-handed but I couldn’t lie the other way around because there are pipes in the way.

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There’s the pipes. The beams coming down on the left of this image are not the edge of the house – there’s another room below to their left. I have to turn sideways to get between these beams. The secret to surviving this sort of carry on is to wear a facemask, a decent headtorch and kneepads. Kneepads are crucial! Why don’t they make them in bright colours though? What’s the point of making something black or dark green?

Click to... oh you know!

This was the trickiest working space I’ve ever been in my life. Six foot two is the wrong height to do this kind of work! In the picture above you can see the space to the left of the beams on the left of the previous picture. Oh look! There’s a secondary water tank. I guess the water tanks are put where they are easy to access but, for my purpose, they were in the way of everything I had to do. In this image you can see a dark round junction box. Inside that there’s the wiring arrangement to deal with an incoming cable, an outgoing cable, a cable to the bloody shower downlight and a cable to the switch.

Just not in the mood for blogging. Not in the mood for completing the last lighting circuit either. It’s a particularly tricky number.

Yesterday I started and completed the main equipotential bonding. Here’s the incoming gas pipe bonded to earth.

That wasn’t done before…

The bottom of this wall had turned to a lose crumble. Luckily the bit above was held intact by the bit around the side. I remortared it and squeezed a 35mm back box into it. Just under an hour later, I wriggled the back box out and waited another 23 hours.

Spent yesterday taking things apart. Things made in a time now called yesteryear. Electrical things. Mainly it was old sockets and junction boxes. I’m going to recycle the copper – it’s worth a bit of money these days. Scrap merchants will pay for it. You can ring around for prices and take the best offer. Gone are the days when you had to pay them to take it away.

The most interesting deconstruction involved my old fuse board.

The real highlight of my day was a visit from my wife, who was absolutely delightful. She didn’t stay long – I sent her off to a gig she wanted to go to, whilst I went back to work. Regular readers will know that a little while back, this grafting project of mine came close to deconstructing my marriage. I’m pleased to report that we’re a happy couple once more, albeit in difficult circumstances.

Took down the wall mounted cabinets in my kitchen yesterday: three double, five single and one half cupboard cupboards. All on my own. This was not easy. Also made two new cavities, for switch fused spurs. These are going to handle the under cabinet lighting. After that I took down all the tiles in the kitchen. Now the kitchen looks like this:

That’s the first time I’ve seen that little window from the inside. Here’s another image of the theoretical kitchen:

And one last one, as much for my benefit as anyone else’s:

After all that, I went out to catch up with my wife, who is sensibly staying at a friend’s house. Luckily, there were some leftovers from their meal when I got there. A couple of beers, a well timed bus journey home and I slept like a man being sued by Paul Randle-Jolliffe. Untroubled.