Wiring an electric shower - cable route

[PistolPeteUK]

Hi All,


We are considering getting an electric shower fitting to the main bathroom of the house. This will obviously need wiring and I'm not 100% sure how they'll wire it to the distribution board.

Bathroom is on the 1st floor at the back of the house and the distribution board is in the WC on the ground floor next to the front door.

Shortest way would be up from the DB into the space between ground floor ceiling and first floor and back to the bathroom and coming up, but we've laminate flooring then carpet then tiling over 22mm-ish chipboard panelled type floor. Another way would be up into the loft and across to the front of the house and feed the cable behind the dot and dab plasterboard and down.... but I'm not sure if that's possible / allowed.

How would you tackle this?? I basically want to know if it's an easy enough job to do or will they need to rip up flooring / cut channels in ceilings in which case we might give it a miss.

Thanks in advance.


Pete

 

[holmslaw]

..

 

[ban-all-sheds]

How would you tackle this?? I basically want to know if it's an easy enough job to do or will they need to rip up flooring / cut channels in ceilings in which case we might give it a miss.

Ask electricians to quote.

An experienced person seeing the job in the flesh is really the only one who can reliably tell you how it can be done - he may have all sorts of techniques and wrinkles to get cables into and through places that you've not dreamt of. Here you can only get generic advice like "that sort of thing should be possible".

Be warned that laminate flooring can make things a complete PITA though - as a rule of thumb it's a flooring type to be avoided.


As ever, personal recommendations are always the best way to find a reputable tradesman, but if you're having to go ahead without much in the way of those, or references, don't put any store by registration itself - sadly it is possible to become registered with woefully inadequate qualifications and zero practical experience. You don't have to spend long here to see people cropping up who are registered and "qualified", but who are clearly seriously incompetent in reality and who should not be charging for their services.

You are looking for someone to run a large cable through a house, and it may surprise and dismay you to learn that it is quite possible to become a "certified electrician" without ever having done that before, and without having acquired any of the practical skills needed to do it without half-destroying your house in the process.

It's your money, £'00s of it, and you have every right to ask prospective tradesmen what their qualifications and experience are. Just being listed here is not a good enough guide. No genuinely experienced electrician, with the "full set" of C&G qualifications will mind you asking - in fact he will wish that everyone was like you.

I feel sorry for people who have been misled by training organisations and (shamefully) the Competent Person scheme organisers into thinking that a 5-day training course, a couple of trivial examples of their work and some basic understanding of how to use test equipment will make them an electrician, but not sorry enough to agree with them trying to sell their services to Joe Public.

 

[PistolPeteUK]

Thanks to both of you for your responses.

@holmeslaw - not even looked at showers yet as we weren't going to bother if we found out it was too much like hard work and would cause lots of disruption.

@ban-all-sheds - thanks for that. Again, we didn't want to get anyone in if the general consensus was to leave it, but I may get a few people in for quotes to see.