adminThe average cost of rewiring a standard-sized house in the United Kingdom is around £7,000 although the figure is likely to vary depending on certain factors. The factors include the size and the location of your property, the extent of rewiring you want to do, and other such factors. If your lights flicker continuously or a circuit breaker trips and you have to reset it time and again then you should better hire a licensed electrician to look into the problem. Problems like these are usually resolved by rewiring the property freshly.
Rewiring a home is not an easy task by any standard. You have to plan it in advance and also set a budget to make the odds work in your favor. In the following sections of this blog post let us round up all the crucial factors related to the electrical rewiring of a home.
Rewiring Cost Per Foot of Your Property
As per standard practice per linear foot of wiring costs within the range from £0.12 to £2.75 and this cost does not include the labour cost involved. Although electrical rewiring or rewiring is calculated by linear foot it is still possible to estimate the total amount of wire that is necessary to wire a property from the total square footage of it. This estimation is measured at a 1:1 ratio and an example will further make this clearer.
Suppose you have a home that measures 2,000 sq ft in area. To rewire this property you will need about 2,000 feet of wiring material and this calculation is based on the 1:1 formula mentioned above. In the following section of the blog post let us go through a few more examples to understand this matter more clearly.
|
Calculated area of a property in terms of sq ft |
Estimated cost of wiring or rewiring the property |
|
500 |
£710 |
|
1,000 |
£1420 |
|
1,500 |
£2130 |
| 2,000 |
£2,840 |
| 2,500 |
£4,600 |
| 3,000 |
£4,400 |
Estimated Rewiring Cost of a House and the Type of Project Involved
The electrical rewiring cost of your home is impacted by the type or extent of the rewiring project you undertake. Electrical rewiring is not only about running wires and cables across your property but may also involve additional work like upgrading the existing electrical panel, installing new electrical outlets as well as switches and wires, opening walls to facilitate the running of wires, and other such factors. For each of these additional works, there will be a different price added to the overall estimation of a project.
In the following sections of this post let us go through a breakdown of the total cost of rewiring a property. This breakdown is assumed based on the project type undertaken.
- Electrical panel upgrading
In the course of rewiring your home, you may discover that your existing electrical needs to be upgraded. So you have to add the cost of a new panel along with the labor to install it to your estimation figures. Usually, the cost of upgrading electrical panels ranges from £315 to £2,000 and you will probably pay an amount that lies in the middle of this range to install a 200 amps panel. In residential homes, a 200 amp panel is a standard configuration keeping in view the steadily increasing demand for electrical consumption in modern society.
- Opening walls to run wires through those
In the course of rewiring your property, there may also be the need to run wires through walls and for that, you have to open the walls. The standard cost of knocking down walls ranges from £0.32 to £5.00 per square foot says an expert having years of experience in rewiring houses in London. The cost varies depending on the type of walls you have. Stone walls and load-bearing walls are the most costly to knock down. Breaking down these types of walls requires a high level of skill and the replacement materials are also costly. On the other hand dry walls are fast and easy to break down and also easy to replace. Therefore the cost of knocking down dry walls is pretty reasonable.
- Installing electrical outlets and switches
The usual cost of installing an electrical outlet in residential properties ranges from £99 to £138. However certain outlets are costly and therefore the cost of installing such outlets is much higher. A GFCI or ground fault circuit interrupter is one such example. It may cost you £395 to install each GFCI outlet in your home. To put it in simple words, the higher the voltage you require the higher is the price of the outlet.
- Wiring a newly built house
Though this sounds interesting wiring a newly built house indeed works out cheaper than rewiring an old building. There are reasons why electrician rewiring costs for old buildings are costlier. Newer buildings have easier layouts to access wires and it is also easier to install fresh wires in new buildings compared to older ones. Moreover, older buildings often throw up surprises. It is also important to note that building regulations have changed over the decades to make things easier for electricians to access walls.
The Cost of Rewiring a Property also Varies with the Materials you choose
The type of materials you choose to rewire your home also plays a part in determining the cost of the project. For example, different types of cables or wires are there in the market to wire or rewire electrical systems. Each of these wires costs differently and this cost ranges from £0.12 to £0.50 per linear foot at the lower end of the spectrum. At the higher end, the cost ranges from £1.20 to £2.75 per linear foot.
The three most commonly used wires are the following –
- THWN or THHN wire – It is one of the most reasonably priced wiring options and the cost ranges from £0.12 to £1.20 feet.
- NM cable – This one costs within the range of £0.40 to £3.00 feet.
- UF cable – This option is more suitable for outdoors where harsh climatic conditions ranging from high heat to damp and chilly conditions are expected. The cost ranges between £0450 and £3.00 feet.
According to skilled and qualified electricians working in Electric Works London even the age of your house is a factor in determining the cost of rewiring. Rewiring older properties requires a lot of time, effort, and toil compared to rewiring newly constructed buildings. As a result, the cost of rewiring older buildings, homes, and properties is usually higher.
