We are rewiring an older house; what should we add while every floorboard is up?
A rewire is the second-best moment, after a new build, to make a house ready for the next twenty years of how people actually live. The wires themselves are the smallest part of the value. The conduits, the data runs, the dedicated circuits for things that do not exist yet, the changes to the consumer unit that make a battery or a heat pump easy to add later; these are what people regret leaving out.
The moment
A short scene that puts you in the room where the decision actually gets made.
The electrician has lifted the first floorboard and is shaking his head at the rubber-sheathed cable from the seventies. The quote is for a like-for-like rewire to current regulations. The honest brief is bigger than that.
The typical order
What to decide, in roughly this order.
Fabric first, services second, kit last. Each step is listed in the sequence we would work through it, because doing one out of order tends to make the next one harder than it needed to be.
Heat leaves through every uninsulated surface. The room cools faster than the boiler can refill it.
Before the floorboards come up
Write down every room, every appliance, and every device that may want power in the next ten years
An EV charger, a heat pump, a hot tub, a workshop, a home office with a server, a future loft conversion; each one needs a circuit, and adding them after the rewire is finished costs roughly five times as much.
First fix
Specify a consumer unit with capacity for surge protection, an EV breaker and battery isolation
The cheapest consumer unit on the market will need replacing again the first time you add solar or a heat pump. A slightly larger one now buys two decades of flexibility.
First fix
Pull Cat6 to every room and a 32A radial to the kitchen, the garage and any future heat-pump location
Wireless mesh networks are a workaround for missing cabling, not a substitute. A heat pump or induction hob installed onto undersized wiring is the worst kind of expensive surprise.
Second fix
Decide deliberately what is and is not on a smart control system
Smart lighting in living rooms tends to delight; smart switches in hallways and bathrooms tend to frustrate. Choose where the cleverness lives, and where simple switches will outlast the app.
Watch-outs
The mistakes we see often enough to mention them in writing. Some are expensive; all are avoidable.
- Downlights cut through ceiling insulation and create a thermal weak point; specify airtight, fire-rated fittings or accept the cold spot above each one.
- USB sockets specified everywhere age fast; specify a few, and keep the rest as standard sockets that can take whatever charger the next decade brings.
- Smart home wiring done by an electrician who does not commission it ends up as expensive copper with no software behind it.
Problems this often resolves
Read these first if you have not started the project yet. They explain what to rule out before any product is on the table.
Technologies in scope
Likely to enter the conversation at some stage. Each links to an honest write-up rather than a sales page.
The pattern above is not a checklist; it is an order of operations. The homeowners who finish a project like this one and look back without regret are almost always the ones who refused to be hurried at the start, did the fabric work before the kit, and brought in the heating engineer before the plasterer rather than after.
Open the Home Planner
Test these decisions on a model of a UK home before any of them have to be made in real life.