routed cables underneath windowsill!

[180turbo]

I wonder if someone can shed any light on this for me?

We recently moved into a 1950s house and have redecorated most rooms and have now come to the downstairs loo, which i think used to be a pantry many years ago, underneath the stairs.

They\\\'ve put a small corner sink underneath the window, but after stripping the wallpaper off, we can now see 2 (looks like 2.5mm T+E) cables that come out of the wall, travel underneath the overhanging window sill (6 inches above the sink) and then dissapear through a new studded wall into the kitchen to feed 2 sockets on their own on the same wall.

I\\\'m not sure now if this is legal (probably not) but would it have been in the regs to do that years ago?

Ideally we\\\'d like to tile the lower half of the walls but i doubt we\\\'d be able to tile over the 2 cables protruding from the walls!

Any ideas on this?

I think the cables go into the wall and come out at the bottom of the wall and go through some trunking to the consumer unit underneath the smallest part of the stairs on their own re-wireable fuse.

This is the first problem I\\\'m putting on here.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[jj4091]

I think the easiest way would be to try & fit some 25 mm plastic trunking around the cables & tile up to it.

 

[Space cat]

If it was mine I'd be looking to get those cables right out of the loo. Are your floors hollow and can you get underneath?

 

[180turbo]

Unfortunetly the floor is solid, they dropped the level of the floor so you do actually step down from the hall into the loo (not the bowl! lol).

I agree that the cables need to come out too. I think that the only way these cables could get into the kitchen then would be to go outside in conduit, like the ones that are already running along side in plastic conduit to the garage.


I'm not sure who they got to do the wiring but they also seem to have moved an immersion heater switch into the room too (there is also another immersion heater switch in the airing cupboard next to the tank) on the wall (1.5M high) and have wired the light switch to this too! The cable coming out the wall (high up again) for the light just looks like some bell wire, not double insulated at all! I was thinking of removing the cable to this spare immersion heater switch (which will leave the original in the airing cupboard) and running a new cable down from the lighting circuit to get a properly wired light switch and light too. Is this feasible?

 

[Space cat]

We have a loo under the stairs too. Ours started life as a coal house with a door to the outside but others in the same street are pantries just like yours. The coal house had a concrete slab floor about 10cm lower than the floorboards in the rest of the house but outside of this small area the sub-floor space is deep enough to crawl around in. Have you got solid floor everywhere else?

If I read your post right, you have an immersion heater circuit (15 amp radial?) with a light tapped off it using bell wire. . That should definitely come out. I don't see what purpose the switch is serving anyway. Did they expect to switch it on while sitting on the loo so as to get hot water at the basin?

I think you're right to get that switch out of there and take the cable directly to the fuse box. The lighting could be taken from somewhere overhead but it might not be as easy as bringing it through the wall from the fuse box. What's directly above the ceiling? We have a half landing up there so any cable from above would have to pass directly underneath some stair treads. Our loo light is a low voltage one with the 'transformer' on the other side of the wall in the cupboard under the stairs.

 

[180turbo]

>>>Have you got solid floor everywhere else? >>>
yes in the kitchen but not in the hall, they've put in real oak flooring and i doubt it'll come up very easily.

I'm not sure the immersion heater is on its own circuit, unless it started off like that and then they put in 2 sockets also in the kitchen, it does seem weird unplugging the fuse for just 2 sockets, i need to test it out.

The youngish guy we bought it off was in a wheel chair so he said they'd had that immersion heater switch put in the loo to save him going upstairs to put it on. To be honest i doubt we'd use it as we have a combi boiler in the bathroom airing cupboard that does heating and water.

Would it be ok to remove the power to the immersion heater or is that a legal requirement to have a powered one?

I did check last night, and the immersion heater switch in the downstairs loo does feed the originally immersion heater switch in the airing cupboard next to the tank. The upstairs one is always open and the downstairs one turns it on/off. This means that there must be a cable route upstairs through the half landing we have too.

At the minute the light we have in the loo has an energy saving bulb in it (20watts i think), so doesn't draw much load.

We need to decorate (someone coming round to do it this Sunday i think) so i need to take out the wiring for this mess, as we don't use the sockets in the kitchen as they're on the outside wall. If this results in there being no power to the immersion heater for a while too then so be it. All i need to do then is wire the light up with proper cable.

 

[Space cat]

I've never heard of any legal requirement to have an immersion heater. On the other hand, since the heater is there, connecting it up is well worth the effort. You'll be pleased you did when your boiler breaks down!

I agree that there must be a cable route somewhere for the immersion heater cable but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to use it for anything new. It all depends upon when the cable was put in and how. Our upstairs cables used to take the following route:

1) Down from the CU behind a gas pipe, at which point their insulation was burnt half way through. (The pipe was a later addition and somebody had soldered a joint in it right in front of the cables. B******y cowboys! )

2) Up a corner in the cupboard under the stairs and over the top of a brick wall just below the stair treads.

3) Strapped to a piece of wood fixed below the treads, inside the old coal house which had become a boiler house, until they reached the opposite wall. Those same cowboys obviously believed PVC to be completely fire proof!

4) Through the brick and up behind the plaster on the kitchen wall into the ceiling void. No trunking!

At this point they parted company and the immersion cable went through a couple of joists before finally emerging in the airing cupboard.

Trying to take any new cables up that way was a non-starter. With the exception of a few lighting cables which are now in a false ceiling above the new loo, they have all been relocated.

PS: I forgot to mention that the old immersion cable was black rubber! That one wasn't behind the gas pipe though. It came out of the top of the CU and went diagonally across the wall to join the others!

PPS: The gas pipe was for the boiler in the coal house and most of it is still there. It's 22mm, stepped UP from 15mm soldered into the original lead pipe attached to the meter. You couldn't make it up if you tried!

But I digress ---

I was hoping that you would have a sub-floor void where you could run cables to the kitchen. Since the kitchen floor is solid, a void anywhere else wouldn't help anyway. Reading between your lines, I think you're planning to spur the light off the immersion cable. Even with a fused spur, which you would definitely need, that's not good practice. Try to get a new run of 1 sq mm cable through the wall from a lighting circuit on your CU instead.

 

[180turbo]

But I digress ---

I was hoping that you would have a sub-floor void where you could run cables to the kitchen. Since the kitchen floor is solid, a void anywhere else wouldn't help anyway. Reading between your lines, I think you're planning to spur the light off the immersion cable. Even with a fused spur, which you would definitely need, that's not good practice. Try to get a new run of 1 sq mm cable through the wall from a lighting circuit on your CU instead.

Yes it does seem there are lots of cowboys around who can't be bothered with doing a decent job, they've got no pride in their work.

The current wall light in the loo is already taken off the immersion heater cable! Thats what i'm going to renew to to a proper light circuit like you say. I do have some 1mm (or 1.5mm) T+E in the garage on a roll. I may have time at the weekend to take the carpets and boards up on the landing to see whats what. If i get time i could also post a few photo's up of the "mess" if i can figure out how to get them to display...