The Money Pit

Swapping My Consumer Unit

So, as of the beginning of this year, it's "illegal" to do your own electrics. Well, it's not as simple as that. In fact it's not simple at all. There's a long thread on uk.d-i-y all about the subject. The consensus seems to be that you can DIY it but that you should say you didn't. The alternative is to get a buildings inspector to come and inspect your work every time you do something "significant".

Would significant include what I want to do next, which is to replace my Consumer Unit:

The Consumer Unit is the white "fuse box" on the left. It's old and crap and only has four fuses for the whole house. The lighting for both floors is on the one fuse as are the ring mains for both floors. Not good. Turn on every light in the house and it trips out.

As part of doing the kitchen I need to sort some of the electrics out and want to send ring mains to the outside shed (currently fed by an extension cable plugged in to the kitchen, which goes through a whole in the kitchen wall! and feeds the pond's pump), the garage (currently powerless) and send a wire up the kitchen wall, which will ultimately find its way to the loft (in case I ever get round to converting it). Needless to say I need more fuses than four.

Ideally I'd like to separate each floor on to its own fuse, but that really is a significant job. For now I want to keep it as it is, with room for more fuses. I've found a suitable unit with plenty of room for expansion. Now I just need to swap the units over.

The trouble is the main 100A fuse for the house. It's in the bottom right of the photo near the "service head". This part belongs to the electricity provider and the fuse is tagged to make sure it's not tampered with. I need to remove it to do the work and don't want to have to call them out to remove it. Nor do I want to pay a qualified sparky to do the job for me. Not sure what to do. My instinct is telling me to just do it and try and replace the crimp tag.

Ultimately the wiring for the whole house needs looking at anyway. I'll worry about the legalities of it all when we get round to doing that.

Getting Some Head

Remember last August I talked about our cellar and its pump system? Since it first broke down it's been nothing but bother. We've had three floods in the cellar and three replacement pumps. The big problem (aside from the fact that the cellar floor is below the water table) has always been that central heating pumps just don't give good head (oooh, matron). The other problem is that the system lets air in like a slow puncture. If it then rains after a long dry spell there's an air pocket and it won't pump water out. Unless you're keeping one eye on the weather and the other on the pump you've likely to miss it and the cellar floods.

Today I got round to doing something about it and installed a submersible water pump. This one gives really good head. About 5m of it!

I bought it from ScrewFix, who do next day delivery and seem to stock just about everything you could ever need. The Wolf Dirty Water Pump was fairly good value at £45. All I needed to buy was a brass 3/4" to 22mm adaptor. They do a model with a float switch but I already have the mercury rocker switch built in to the original contraption.

The white pipe you can see in this shot is the run-off from our new condensing boiler. Which, apparently, is slightly acidic. I hope it's not going to rot the inside of my new pump. Oh well, back to sleeping easy during those nasty storms.

Shiney New Boiler

The plumber were here from 8:20am onwards yesterday. He left us with a brand new boiler dutifully supplying us with on-demand hot water. Nice. Never thought I'd get excited about such things!

As you can probably see, it's in the cellar, out of the way. The only thing separating it from the room above is the floorboarding. Luckily for us it runs quite quietly.

When he recommended this model to us I had little idea of what 15 litres per minute was. It's a lot. Unlike other "combis" (ours is a condensing) I've used in the past, this one can fill a bath really quickly. I'm impressed.

One downside to moving the boiler was the need to expel the fumes on this side of the house. As you can see below we've a new eye-sore. The flue he used is as tall as this so as to "meet the regs".

Oh well. No worse than the waste-pipe all houses have from bathrooms I suppose. Maybe we can grow some ivy up it.

As he plumbed all this in I went to work on the removing old system. Not sure what he thought my motives for helping out were but I've saved him a day's work. Had some fun in the process too. You can see most of the old system in the shot above. What a waste hey?

Plumber Coming

The plumber is coming at "tea time" tonight to bring the new boiler he's fitting on saturday. Apparently he's just going to fit it to the cellar wall and do the actual fitting and moving of old boiler on Saturday.

Here's the setup as it is:

On the left is the boiler - above the oven in the corner of the kitchen. No idea why it's up there. On the right is the hot water tank - above and to the right of the boiler and in the spare room, behind the built-in wardrobes.

Here's where the new boiler is going:

It's down in the cellar - out of the way. The hot water tank will no longer needed as the new boiler is a combi type (well, it's a condensing one, but the principal's the same. is it not?).