Adding sockets/points into existing house

seamus

Right, I've a little bit of knowledge here but that makes me dangerous.

My house (duplex) basically doesn't have enough sockets as far as I'm concerned. It's generally wooden-framed inside (blockwork outside) and all the blockwork inside has a cavity with insulation, then plasterboard (not sure what that's called). The main board is downstairs in the hall. I would like to put sockets in the hall (there are none for some bizarre reason), and I would also like to put sockets in the attic.

On top of this, I would like to cable up each room to CAT6 (twice in some rooms), returning to a patch panel in the attic.

Am I right in thinking that this would require the sparky to basically rip open huge conduits in the plasterboard to run the cabling and have it plastered back up and painted? If they were running CAT6 from the attic, to a downstairs room, am I right in thinking that this would require him to rip out the plasterboard all the way down to that room?
Does this sound like a needlessly large job?

I wired up lights in the attic, which I had originally intended to feed directly from the lighting circuit upstair, but I couldn't run the wire from the nearest switch upstairs because the light switch had a metal casing around it inside the wall.

Davy

Its very hard to say without actually seeing the rooms, walls etc. Floor broads can be great then you would only have a small amount of plasterwork to repair.

Minitrucking on the surface is always a option, but a last one, looks terrible. You could post some pics you wanted better advice of the best routes but getting a sparky in would give better results i think.

seamus

Cheers Davy, that's what I thought you'd say

The place is only 3 years old, so built to modern norms, if there is such a thing. I think what's stalling me from figuring it out most of that all of the switches and sockets have a steel backplate in behind the plasterboard, which looks like it was put in place *before* the plasterboard. This prevents the backplate from being taken it out to allow a new cable to be run into/from it for another socket in the circuit. Would that be normal - i.e should it be possible to remove this backplate, or does it depend on the house? Or maybe I'm just being too precious about my plasterwork

Davy

They are knockout boxes. They have precut holes all around the box, top bottom and sides. You only knock out the holes you need. The boxes can be put in before and after the plasterboard.

To remove them you can take of the socket/switch, then unscrew he box from the wall, if its put on with nail gun its going to a be a lot harder and will cause damage to the plasterwork.

Another option is if you can get access to the cavity from below or from the other side of the partition you wont need the box, if you can fish the cable/flexicon to the box then you can gland it from the box. Hope this makes some sense to you

astrofool

I've been doing this recently, and used behind the skirting boards to access each room. I got to the skirting boards by using fish tape, and also a stud detector to check where the beams were. The internal walls usually have a cross beam which would make them harder to use, so far I've wired up the front of the house this way with multiple coax/cat6 to each room, and I'm just about to start the back of the house (and then add more insulation to the attic eaves).

Sparky

As davy has mentioned its something that needs to be looked at and yourself informed of the methods as to how the sparks is going to go about their work.

In many cases if the walls are studded, the power cables can be fished through the walls. Where there is crossmembers between the studs, there would be a bit of damage done to the wall to get through that crossmember. Again the ways would have to be checked and methods informed to you

Installing the network cabling can be alot easier IMO as I have always chosen the method of trying to lift floorboards and fishing them through joists etc and allowing one area in any room in the house for the bulk of teh cabling to go. I find its alot easier and less messy to have a liitle bit of damage up from a floor to a network point, rather than a chase down a wall Also taking into account that eac point needs its own cable run