John Rumm wrote:
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?

Its ok, but probably hard work. A more pragmatic split might be to do
a ring for the front and another for the back of the house (or left
and right), or house and kitchen (or some combination etc). There is
no reason the split *has* to be upstairs / downstairs. Splitting an
existing ring front and back say - would only require you run a couple
of additional "legs" out to the split point, and would leave most
other sockets / cables untouched.

Thanks John, and indeed everyone who contributed to the thread. I've now got
a way forward

Bill