I’ve got an electrician around rewiring the lighting circuit. It’s an old house with lath & plaster walls and the wiring is ancient.
The question is, would you normally expect the electrican to have to cut a feed hole near the ceiling above the light switches? This is to help him get the wire down to the switch.
I live in a house where the old part is lath and plaster. I have not had this part rewired but I do know that the construction of lath and palster can leave very little space between the adjoining walls to pass wire through- it is a different matter with plaster board construction as you have clear open voids. With lath and plaster the plaster can block the voids almost completely if it was applied generously at any point. Cutting a hole would allow direct access and the ability to knock the blocking plaster out of the way.
Presumably there must be an old wire that already runs from the light switch to the light-fitting. One of the easiets ways to replace cable is to tie the new one to the old one then pull the old one out. In a perfect world the new cable would always slip through easily, but perfect world it isn’t. It’s understandable that an electrician would make a hole if there were no other options, he should fill this in again as most electricians are skilled at patching small holes.
Just one hole? Lucky you.
Doesn’t matter if it’s UK, US or anything else. Sometimes, you just gotta make a hole along the way to drill through framing timbers or navigate around other wires, pipes or heating ducts.
Someone put a ceiling light in our living room years ago. To get from the wall switch to the middle of the ceiling, it looks like they hopped through on a pogo stick as there’s a wiggly line of six patched spots between switch and light.
I assume that the electrician is wiring the switch from the ceiling rose, this is the standard way, but in older houses it can be impossible oor uneconomic.
Anyway, assuming that we are talking the standard wiring pattern, he will be taking a wire from the ceiling rose which will be in the middle of the upstairs floor, and running it to a point above where the light switch is to be.
If it is an upstairs room, it is fairly easy, you just go into the loft and run the cable to the top of the wall where the lightswitch is.
If it is a downstairs room, it is very likely that a few floorboards will have to be lifted so that he can reach into the hole left by one lifted floorboard, and try fiddle the wire across to the destination where he will have lifted another floorboard.
Getting the cable to fall right is not so easy, usually I would drill a hole in the ceiling vertically above the lightswitch, and I would do that from the room drilling upwards, that way it is easier to ensure the line of the cable run is straight. It also means that if he were in a loft, he would see the hole easier with daylight shining through it.
If the wall has a cavity, such as studding or plastered lats, I might well put a couple of holes down the wall so I can see the cable come between the cavity and also to help me pull the cable down.
It is not at all unusual for the cable to get snagged on some obstacle when trying to feed it through, using the old cable as a drawline might work but not always.
If the elcetrician were lucky, he could perhaps find the old cable coming up from the old lightswitch and if very lucky might be able to use it as a drawline, he would tie a bit of string to it and pull the cable upward taking the string with it, and then tie the new calbe to the string and pull it downwards.
Filling holes is no problem at all.
Thanks people. I was just a little concerned at all the (quite sizable) holes appearing. However, it seems that it’s common enough and that our house is old enough that I shouldn’t be worried.
I worked with my uncle wiring houses in the US when Rural Electrification became a fact. We used a “snake” or long thin, flat wire that would feed down through the walls with the cable to be installed tied to it. An existing wire or cable would work the same way and some of the houses had been wired for DC, wind-driven generator systems so we used those wires. In many cases with either method of pulling in the cable there were fireblocks in the walls and in all cases going from one floor to another in two-story houses we had to break out the plaster and saw the lath and then patch it when we were finshed.
Also, in some cases those who wired the house for the DC system stapled the wire to a stud so the old cable or wire can’t be used as a snake.
Rewiring old houses can be a bitch.