Additional plugs

[The Family Cyclist]

Firstly I'll make this clear I'm not going to touch the electrics

However I am going to give our spare room a well overdue decorate and it will become one of my kids rooms. Currently it has one single plug socket for which the wire comes up from the floor.

I'm assuming there is no reason why the extras can't be run from under the floor as well? I want to crack on with filling, papering and painting but the wife wisely pointed out there is no point if the electrician has to damage the walls

[rogerzilla]

It is preferred that buried cables run straight up or down, so yes.  It depends on the ease of fishing them through the floor.  Modern houses tend to have big sheets of chipboard instead of floorboards, and joists rarely run the way you want them to.

[Kim]

Life will be considerably easier for the electrician if they don't have to worry about damaging wallpaper etc.  Unless you're happy for them to just mount everything on the surface.

Conceivably you could chase out the walls and install backboxes with pipe running to the under-the-floor void for an electrician to pull cables through later.

[Feanor]

'The wire' singular suggests the socket is not on a ring main, but is a spur off of the ring.

This cannot be extended directly, and additional sockets will require additional wiring to extend the ring.

I'd get the sparkey to look over the job before you decide how to proceed.

[The Family Cyclist]

Currently the single plug is just high enough from the floor to get a plug in and happy for the rest to go that sort of height

It's an old house so has floor boards

I'd like to do as little as possible to the walls. The plaster is very old

[Canardly]

I had a lot of single sockets swopped out for doubles a year or two back and the odd additional spur socket outlet as well. The sparks was really good about keeping the back boxes level and making good around the conduit/back boxes was really easy. Suggest you use Easifil which is really very very good and so easy to work. Most electricians are masters of pulling cable through difficult spaces and have appropriate tools to do so.

[Kim]

'The wire' singular suggests the socket is not on a ring main, but is a spur off of the ring.

Or that the OP has no idea how the socket is wired, in which case the same applies.

(Note that a socket on a ring and a midpoint on a radial are hard to differentiate without wider understanding of the installation, so you can't just unscrew the faceplate and count the wires.)

[The Family Cyclist]

Ah I certainly have no idea. Elastrikery is something I don't play with, I've Contacted a couple of tame electricians to see if they can do it

[rogerzilla]

Spurs off spurs are not unusual in existing houses, although they are not allowed now.

Ring mains are hideous creations designed (as with most things British) to be cheaper and a bit crap.  The potential* for mistakes, like a broken ring or cross-linked rings, is high.


*see what I did there

[Kim]

Ring mains are hideous creations designed (as with most things British) to be cheaper and a bit crap.  The potential* for mistakes, like a broken ring or cross-linked rings, is high.

Agreed.  But if you've already got one, splicing a couple of extra sockets into it is the easy way to gain sockets.

[robgul]

The OP mentions "single plug" (i.e. single socket to be pedantic, the plug is what goes in the socket!)     - there are nifty converters available that fix to a single socket and provide two socket outlets.   We had a relatively modern house where nearly all the socket outlets were singles - fitting the converters was simple and made a massive difference to convenience.

https://www.screwfix.com/search?search=socket+converter+1+gang+to+2+gang#_=p

[jiberjaber]

Currently the single plug is just high enough from the floor to get a plug in and happy for the rest to go that sort of height

It's an old house so has floor boards

I'd like to do as little as possible to the walls. The plaster is very old

If you were adding sockets to a new build, they'll need to go higher, 45cm min (100mm for uninhabited areas like a garage for example) so on that basis you might want to consider something a little higher up. In our house they are about 15cm up from the floor.   

https://www.practicaldiy.com/electrics/socket-position/socket-height.php

[Kim]

The OP mentions "single plug" (i.e. single socket to be pedantic, the plug is what goes in the socket!)

To be more pedantic, the OP is correct: The plug is what goes in the wall, and the plug top is what goes into the plug.

I think 'plug top' has fallen into disuse outside technical documents.  Most younger people just use 'plug' and 'socket' respectively for male and female connectors of all kinds, though some people do use 'plug' for female mains sockets.  I'm wondering if there's a historical British vs American English distinction there, or it was simply less important to specify the gender of a connector in the days when the only connectors you ever encountered were for mains power, and therefore clear from context?

[grams]

To be more pedantic, the OP is correct: The plug is what goes in the wall, and the plug top is what goes into the plug.

Ooh, citation needed!

Not because I don’t believe you, but because Google is doing its charming thing of ignoring quote marks even in verbatim mode.

[Kim]

Yeah, it seems to be almost impossible to google for anything defining the terms (though a search for "plug top" readily returns plenty of items described as such).  The plug/plug top distinction was explained to me by an older electrician back in the 90s.  Now I'm wondering if it's regional within the UK...

It stands to reason that people would tend to use 'socket' in technical contexts these days to avoid confusion ("socket outlet" seems to be common, I suspect it's used in the wording of BS1363).

[rogerzilla]

This is like gas engineers cringing if anyone says "gasometer", isn't it?

[Kim]

This is like gas engineers cringing if anyone says "gasometer", isn't it?

IIRC that one's Lavoisier's fault - his device collecting gas for the purposes of measurement.

[rafletcher]

The OP mentions "single plug" (i.e. single socket to be pedantic, the plug is what goes in the socket!)

To be more pedantic, the OP is correct: The plug is what goes in the wall, and the plug top is what goes into the plug.

I think 'plug top' has fallen into disuse outside technical documents.  Most younger people just use 'plug' and 'socket' respectively for male and female connectors of all kinds, though some people do use 'plug' for female mains sockets.  I'm wondering if there's a historical British vs American English distinction there, or it was simply less important to specify the gender of a connector in the days when the only connectors you ever encountered were for mains power, and therefore clear from context?

At 64 I can say I’ve always used plug and socket, and have never come across the term plug top.

[Feanor]

I have heard 'plug top' as a rather antiquated term, but I've never heard anyone even vaguely electrical refer to the things in the wall as 'plugs'.
They are 'sockets'.

[grams]

“Plugs” and “plug sockets” are absolutely standard colloquial-ish names amongst, er, normals for the things screwed to the wall, as per the title of this thread. Probably some interesting demographic and geographic spread to who uses which.

I’ve just never heard a suggestion before that they might be historically correct.

[rogerzilla]

Remember the brutally literal video for Ant Music, where Marco (I think) actually does unplug the jukebox and do us all a favour?

Now THAT'S a plug top.

[Mr Larrington]

(Sings)
Here come old Plug Top
He come groovin' up slowly
He got joo joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

Or something.

[aidan.f]

Now onto " 'bulbs'.. grow in your garden and 'lamps' fit into luminaires " ... I was young and being corrected by an electrician 38 years ago.

...batteries always used instead of cells eugh!

[fruitcake]

To the OP's question, sorry, I reckon you need to leave the decorating til after the electrics are finished.

Electrical installation is a job that involves a bit of upheaval and mess, unfortunately. Best to empty the room of all furniture. Expect your electrician to break chunks of plaster from the wall iwhen chiselling it for the pattress boxes (the boxes behind the sockets). They should make good using patching plaster and/or polyfilla when the sockets are in. They may need to lift floorboards, which they may or may not reattach securely (in which case those boards would need nailing down again with floorboard nails). This likely won't be through carelessness; their training is electrical safety rather than floorboards or plaster.

Because of the amount of work involved, adding sockets is usually a once-in-a-generation job. So consider fitting more sockets than you think you will need. It could save someone a job in 25 years time.