NT
wibbled on Monday 19 October 2009 13:14

On Oct 19, 12:07*pm, "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?

TIA,
Bill

Its entirely pointless, unless of course you run a lot of large loads
upstairs, for reasons I cant imagine.

Splitting the ring into 2x 20A circuits doesn't gain you anything
much, and only worsens its safety performance.

The only place your average 2 bed house would benefit from a 2nd ring
is the kitchen, where the heavy loads live. But even then, as you
already know, in practice one can run a whole house on a single ring.


NT

I'm putting 4 rings in my house. 1.5 for the kitchen/diner (the other 0.5
serves utility and one bedroom), one for the rest of the ground floor and
one upstairs. It's not necessarily the case that the loads demand it, but
it's geographically convenient and povides sensible seggregation in the
event of one circuit tripping (ie I don't lose the whole house).



--
Tim Watts

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