Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Bill Payer wrote:
Our house was built around the early to mid 60s (so has "modern" PVC
twin & earth cabling) and has just one ring main feeding the whole
house. We want to add in some extra sockets but obviously I don't
want to overload the one circuit so I've had an idea that I want to
run past you peeps here.

Most family/friends houses seem to be wired with an upstairs ring
and a downstairs ring. My idea is to go to all the sockets in the
upstairs rooms and basically pull the cables out of the sockets,
back down to under the floorboards and joint them there (either with
"traditional" junction boxes or with crimps/heatshrink sleeve), so
that the continuity of the ring is preserved but it is now just
serving the downstairs sockets, then run a new ring for the upstairs
sockets, and adding new sockets to each ring where needed.

Is this OK?

I'd say it's making too many unnecessary joints. Do you know where the
ring goes upstairs and back down again? You might well find they are
together. Also if you intend keeping the existing socket positions
upstairs it's making more work.

Well, this is rather the point in doing the job in the first place, ie, we
don't have enough sockets. It's a three-bedroomed house with just one
double-socket in each room and a single socket out on the landing, so doing
it the way I originally thought would leave four joints under the
floorboards. Is that too many?

Other thing is the ECC on older TW&E is smaller than currently. Not
quite sure how that effects radical alteration. But my gut feeling
would be to keep the old ring as short as possible.

TIA,
Bill