Does my house need a full rewire or a partial one?

Does the age of the house decide it?

It gives you a strong hint and nothing more. What matters is what the cable is made of and what condition it is in.

• Rubber sheathed cable, common up to the early 1960s. The rubber goes hard and crumbles, and it falls off the conductor when disturbed. This is a full rewire.
• Lead or cloth covered cable, older again. Same answer.
• Early PVC, from roughly the 1960s and 70s. Often still serviceable, but the circuits around it usually are not: no earth on lighting circuits is the classic finding.
• Modern PVC, from the 1980s onward. Frequently in good order. A house of this age normally needs a board and some additions, not a rewire.

So a 1930s house that was rewired in 1995 needs nothing dramatic, and a 1975 house nobody has touched since might. The date on the deeds is not the date on the cable.

What does a partial rewire usually cover?

The two commonest versions are lighting only and downstairs only.

Lighting only comes up in houses where the sockets were redone at some point but the lighting circuit was left, so there is no circuit protective conductor at the switches. That rules out metal fittings and most modern smart switches, and it is a genuine safety gap, but it does not mean the whole house needs stripping.

Downstairs only comes up with kitchen and extension work, where a good part of the ground floor gets done anyway and it makes sense to finish the job properly rather than join new to old.

A partial rewire always ends with the same paperwork and testing as a full one for the parts that were done. It is a smaller job, not a lesser one.

How do I find out which I need without guessing?

Have an EICR done. It is an inspection and test of the existing installation and it produces a written schedule of what is wrong, coded by severity.

That report is what turns a rewire from a sales conversation into a specification. It tells you which circuits fail, why, and whether the problem is the cable or the accessories on the end of it. It costs a fraction of a rewire and it is the difference between buying what you need and buying what you were told you need.

If a contractor quotes a full rewire without testing anything, that is the moment to get a second opinion. We would rather do the test and tell you the house is fine.

How disruptive is it really?

Honestly: quite. A full rewire means lifting floorboards, chasing walls for cables and back boxes, and making good afterwards. Carpets come up. There is dust.

A house can usually be lived in through it if it is done room by room and power is reinstated at the end of each day, and that is how most of ours run. An empty house is faster and cheaper, which is why rewires cluster around house moves and void periods.

The making good is worth asking about specifically. Some contractors leave chases filled and stop there, others plaster to a finish, and the difference is real money. Get it in writing either way.

What makes one rewire cost more than another?

Not just the number of rooms.

• Whether the house is occupied. Working around a family adds days.
• Floor construction. Solid concrete floors downstairs mean cables go a longer way round.
• How many accessories you want. Adding sockets is the cheapest thing you will ever do while the walls are open and the most expensive after.
• Making good, and to what standard.
• Whether the board, earthing and bonding all need doing at the same time, which they usually do.

The advice that saves people the most money is decide the socket and lighting positions before the work starts, not during. Changes mid job are where budgets go.

Questions we get asked about this