Rewiring my lights bit by bit?

[gbrown100]

I have a three bed semi built late 60's. I have an old style fuse board but for some reason all the lighting in the house is one big lighting circuit running off the one 5 amp supply. I finally understand the layout now (the previous occupant had odd views on electrical safety) and am thinking of rewiring the lighting circuit piece by piece. What I would like to do is create two circuits upstairs as follows:-

Circuit 1 = Main bedroom & Landing / Stair lighting
Circuit 2 = Bedrooms 2 & 3 + Bathroom

The plan is to have two roses, one for each circuit and then radials feeding each room from these roses. For now I would like to then connect the existing supply into both of these roses.

Later on when I have more money I will do the same for the downstairs and then have them connected back to a new consumer unit by a qualified person.

Is this daft or not? Also, does Part P apply here as technically I am not adding more circuits at this time...

Thanks all

 

[Steve]

why do you want so many lighting circuits? 2no 5 amp circuits do most houses fine.

 

[breezer]

If the existing wiring is as bad as you say, then i would suggest you rewire the lot in one go, (upstairs lights) since you will (should have) enough cable to do it, you can then wire it properly

 

[kevnurse]

You have a 3 bed house. Its small fry in relation to the size of some lighting circuits in multi room buildings. Provided that the cables are up to standard, not damaged and are fixed securely, there is no safety reason to change the system. The 5A circuit protection is clearly working (you didn't say it wasn't). You can have up to 10 x 100W light bulbs off that fuse. Provided that you have table lamps around your home, powered through the wall sockets, you will never be completely in the dark when the light fuse blows.

However, its your house. Your plans are safe, although somewhat unusual. I reckon you would be creating new circuits, so Pt P is probably applicable.

 

[gbrown100]

Thanks all.

Kevnurse - The brass screw that holds the fuse wire in is half melted, I suspect that the previous occupiers put a larger fusewire in due to the fuse keep blowing. When I moved in I replaced a lot of the bulbs with energy saving ones and have removed a raft of spotlights as well. I suspect it was overloaded before then...

I think I shall be rewiring it myself and then get a sparky to check it when I have the consumer unit installed.

First step is Seeboard coming in tomorrow to uprate the main incoming fuse from 60amp to, well, whatever it is they decide is safe I guess.

Thanks again!

 

[sm1thson]

at present the upstairs and downstairs may be interlinked via the two way switching in the hall. be carefull not to seperate upstairs and downstairs without addressing how the two way switching is done in your hall or you may well end up with a 'shared neutral' (see the wiki) -very dangerous (basically when you turn one circuit off the currant can still be flowing from the other circuit into this ones neutral, testing it it will apear dead (as no voltage to gnd/ netral) untill you cut the wire thus altering the circuit and getting a full 240V accros the two wires left in your hands! even tho you turned the circuits mcb off!

 

[gbrown100]

That doesn't sound very nice

Indeed it does look to me like the feed for upstairs is through the hall / landing feed and so yes I will need to be careful. Isolating the circuit and keeping that on the downstairs circuit would be best I think.

 

[sm1thson]

yeah, my upstairs has its own feed its just that some fool decided to save cable and linked the live feed in the downstairs switch so it also does the upstairs but then it uses the upstairs neutral -ver very bad. just something to watch out for as it all apears to work fine its just it is potentially fatal to anyone working on the electrics that doesnt know its there!