Wiring & Rewiring near you

Approved Document P, the 2013 edition, which took effect on 6 April 2013 and is for use in England, points to regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations 2010 for the list of notifiable electrical work. That list is short: the installation of a new circuit, the replacement of a consumer unit, or any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location. A rewire is the whole list at once. Every circuit is new, the consumer unit is replaced, and almost every house contains at least one special location, which regulation 12(9) defines as the space around a bath or shower within 0.6 metres of the bath tub or shower tray and up to 2.25 metres above finished floor level, or a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater.

There are three routes to certify it, and the deadlines attached to them are the detail worth knowing. A registered competent person self-certifies, and the installer or their registration body must within 30 days of completion give a Building Regulations compliance certificate to the occupier and give the certificate or its information to the building control body. An installer who is not registered may appoint a registered third-party certifier before work begins and must notify that certifier within five days of finishing. Otherwise the work is notified to a building control body before it starts, and the Approved Document notes that a local authority's charge takes account of how much inspection it expects to carry out.

The practical consequence is that a rewire produces two different documents. The BS 7671 electrical installation certificate proves the work meets the wiring standard; the Building Regulations compliance certificate proves it was notified. A conveyancing solicitor will ask for the second one, and it is the one most often missing.

Approved Document P is an England document. Scotland runs a building warrant system under the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, and the Scottish Government's building standards technical handbook for domestic buildings sets out the work that does not need a warrant. The electrical entry there, type 22 in the schedule 3 list, exempts an electrical installation operating at extra-low voltage - not exceeding 50 volts alternating current or 120 volts direct current - and not connected to a supply above those figures. A mains rewire is nowhere near that, so a Scottish rewire is a building standards question to be put to the local authority rather than something a competent person scheme settles on its own.

Wales and Northern Ireland each administer their own building control. If the house is not in England, take the substance from this guide - the circuit design, the certificate, the disturbance - and take the consent route from the authority where the house is. It is a short phone call at the quoting stage and an expensive discovery at the completion stage.

The visible part is small: new accessories, new faceplates, a new consumer unit. The part that determines the disturbance is the containment. Cables need to reach every point, and in a British house that means chasing vertical channels into plaster for switch drops and socket drops, lifting floorboards or carpet to run cables between joists, and getting into the loft. Solid floors, lath-and-plaster ceilings, thick stone walls and flats with concrete slabs each push the route somewhere else, and each alternative has a cost.

A first-fix and second-fix rhythm follows from that. First fix is the destructive stage: cables run, back boxes set, consumer unit position prepared, nothing working. Second fix is the accessories, the terminations, the testing and the energising. Between the two sits making good - plaster, filler, and in a lot of houses a decorator. Whether making good is in the electrician's price, in a builder's price, or in yours is the single biggest source of disagreement on a rewire, and it should be written down before anybody lifts a floorboard.

One planning decision is worth making early: what you want in five years. Adding a circuit for an outbuilding, an EV charge point, a shower, a hob or a battery is far cheaper as spare capacity and a route left in place during a rewire than as a separate job afterwards.

Cable does not have an expiry date. What ends its life is the insulation, and insulation is aged by heat, by ultraviolet light, by being bent repeatedly, by being run under thermal insulation that was added decades later, and by damp. That is why two houses wired in the same decade can test completely differently, and why the honest answer to how long a rewire lasts is that it depends on the conditions you put it in rather than on a number.

Accessories wear faster than cable. Socket contacts lose grip, switches fail mechanically, and terminals loosen as they heat and cool. A rewire resets all of that at once, which is part of why a fully rewired house tests so cleanly - and part of why a partial rewire, mixing new circuits with old accessories, can still throw up codes on the next condition report.

The other thing that ages an installation is nothing to do with the materials. It is load. A house wired for a kettle, a television and an immersion heater now runs induction hobs, heat pumps, car chargers and batteries. The cable may be sound and the design simply out of date, and a condition report will say so in a way that reads like criticism of the original work when it is really a description of how households changed.

Circuit count and cable routes drive the labour, and the building drives both. A three-bedroom house with suspended timber floors, a loft you can stand up in and stud partitions is the easy case. Solid floors, lath-and-plaster ceilings, a flat with concrete slabs, listed fabric, or a house occupied throughout the work all add days. After that the big swings are whether the consumer unit moves, whether making good and decoration are included, how many extra circuits you are adding for future loads, and whether the supply itself needs anything from the network operator. Quotations that differ wildly usually differ on scope rather than on rate, so compare the circuit lists rather than the totals.

LokalMatch is only the introduction. Write the job down once, with your postcode, and electricians working in your area contact you themselves. There is no charge to homeowners; pros pay for the requests that reach them. We do not do the rewiring, we have no part in what anyone quotes, and we do not vet, rank or recommend the firms who get in touch.