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Rewiring your home
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If your home is older, it may require rewiring.
If you live in an older house you may need to think about rewiring your home at some point. This might sound like a daunting proposition, and it is - home rewiring can cause a lot of inconvenience - but if your family's safety is important to you, rewiring should be looked into.
The most sensible first step in the house rewiring process is to ask a trusted electrical contractor to take a look at your home's wiring. If you're lucky, you may discover that not all the circuits in the house need to be replaced. Also work out a detailed plan with the electrician regarding exactly what you require in terms of power-point placement, earthed circuits and so forth.
The ease or difficulty of rewiring your home will be partly dependent on the type of house (i.e. solid brick, timber) that you live in. "When putting in power points in a solid brick home we sometimes have to take up the floorboards," says Darren from Summit Electrical. "If the client doesn't want the floorboards taken up, we look for exterior walls where normally there is a cavity. In a timber home you may have gaps between the walls, so we just drop [the wiring] down the side of the walls. In a solid brick house we can also look at going into the interior walls of the house and putting power points there." However, when rewiring two-storey houses, there's no avoiding cutting up the floorboards on the second level.
A more modern, tidier option is to install a home automation system, which requires less wiring and is most commonly used for lighting. According to Darren, not many people are taking up this option yet because of the high cost of the technology.
When it comes to the question of staying in the home versus taking yourself away while the house rewiring job is being done, the best thing to do is ask yourself how much you think you can bear. Darren says most of his clients stay at home, and he makes sure the rewiring job is done in such a way that the family always has electricity in the evening, when they are home. Other people, especially those getting their floorboards ripped up, may prefer to take a short holiday.
Fully rewiring your home can be pricy; a three-bedroom house could cost between $5000 and $10,000, depending on the number of power points required, accessibility and whether the home is of solid brick or timber construction.
