Rewiring an older South Yorkshire house
Age is the single biggest variable. Two houses on the same street can be twenty years apart in build date and land a world apart on price, purely because of what counted as normal practice when they were first wired.
Ex-pit terraces. The Dearne Valley is full of them, solid rows built for colliery families in Wath, Swinton, Mexborough, Wombwell and Rawmarsh. The ones that have never been touched are usually running rubber-insulated cable, sometimes with a lead sheath, and rubber does not age well.
It goes brittle, especially in a hot loft or where it has been pulled tight over a joist, and it can crumble away from the conductor when you disturb it. On the plus side, a terrace with a cellar and a decent loft gives us two brilliant routes for new cable, so a lot of the work happens out of sight rather than up your walls.
Nineteen-thirties semis. The bay-fronted semis strung along the main roads are the classic case of a house wired for a very different life. Two sockets in a room, none at all on the landing, no earth at the light switches, and a rewireable fuse box under the stairs that somebody has added a circuit to at some point. Suspended timber floors upstairs make first fix reasonable. Solid ground floors make it harder, and that is normally where the extra time goes.
Postwar council-built houses. Right to Buy means a great many of these are privately owned now, and their wiring histories are all over the place. Some were rewired by the council in the eighties and are perfectly serviceable.
Others had a partial job, so you get modern cable on the sockets and something much older still feeding the lights. That mix is the one homeowners are most often surprised by, and it is exactly why we survey rather than assume.
Stone and period properties. Thick stone walls, lath and plaster, and often a listing or a conservation area to respect. Chasing is not always the answer, so it becomes a job of planning routes rather than cutting them, and it takes longer for good reason.
Houses from the eighties onwards. Usually these do not need rewiring at all. The cable is modern PVC and it is generally sound. What they do tend to need is a consumer unit with proper RCD protection and a few extra circuits, which is a fraction of the cost and the disruption. We will tell you that rather than quote you for a rewire you do not need, and a condition report is the way to settle it either way.
Agreeing what goes where, before anyone lifts a floorboard
This is the part most people wish they had spent longer on, and it costs nothing to get right.
A rewire is the one chance in about thirty years to put the electrics where you actually want them, at the point when everything is already open. Moving a socket at that stage is a few metres of cable. Moving it afterwards is a job in its own right.
So before we price anything we walk the house with you, room by room, and write down what goes where. Where the bed will sit and therefore which side wants the sockets. Whether the telly is going on the wall and where the cables need to come out. Sockets at worktop height in the kitchen rather than behind the units.
A proper outside socket instead of a lead through a window. Power and light in the garage, the shed and the loft. Whether the landing and the stairs want two-way switching, and whether anybody actually wants downlights in the bedroom or just thinks they should.
Ask for that back in writing, circuit by circuit, with the price built on it. Any electrician worth using will give you one, and it means the quote you are comparing is a description of your house rather than a number on a page.
Wiring a house for how it will be used in ten years
The reason to rewire used to be purely safety. Increasingly it is capacity, and it is worth thinking a step ahead while everything is open.
Homes around here are steadily going electric. A car on the drive that wants charging overnight, an induction hob replacing gas, a heat pump on the horizon, a battery in the garage, somebody working from a bedroom with a desk full of equipment. Every one of those is a serious load, and a house wired in 1955 for a kettle and a wireless has nothing spare for any of it.
Planning for that during a rewire is nearly free. It means sizing the main tails and the consumer unit properly, leaving genuine spare ways rather than a board that is full on the day it goes in, and running a cable out to the drive or the garage now even if the charger itself is a year or two away. The same goes for a route to the roof space if solar and battery storage are anywhere in your thinking.
Retrofitting all of that later means going back into finished walls. Doing it now is a bit of cable and ten minutes of conversation.
What you are left with at the end
Every circuit is tested and you are handed an Electrical Installation Certificate with a full schedule of test results, plus a consumer unit that is labelled properly so the next person to open it can tell which switch does what.
Keep that paperwork somewhere safe, because it earns its keep twice. Once with your insurer, and again when you come to sell: a rewire with certification behind it answers the conveyancing enquiry in one document, whereas an undocumented one tends to invite a retention or a price chip. We are NICEIC-approved, so the certification that comes off our jobs is the kind that stands up to that scrutiny.
What does house rewiring cost?
Every house is different, so we would rather look at yours and give you a fixed written price than guess at a figure here. What we will not do is quote a headline number over the phone and then find reasons to grow it once the floors are up.
If you want the detail before you ring anybody, we have written it all up properly: realistic price ranges by property size, what pushes a job up or down, and what a quote should and should not include. It is in our guide to how much it costs to rewire a house.
Rewires across the Dearne Valley and beyond
We are based in Wath upon Dearne, so the terraces and estates described above are quite literally the houses on our own doorstep. Beyond the valley we take on rewires across Rotherham and Barnsley, out towards Doncaster and Sheffield, with the full list on our areas we cover pages.
If you are weighing one up, the sensible first step is usually an inspection rather than a quote. It tells you whether you are looking at a full rewire, a partial one, or a new board and a good night's sleep.