What does an electrician check before a kitchen refit?

What does an electrician actually check before a kitchen refit?

Four things, in this order, and the first one is usually the thing nobody has decided yet.

The appliance list. An oven, an induction hob, a microwave, a dishwasher, a washing machine, a dryer, an extractor, a boiling water tap and an American fridge freezer is a completely different job to an oven, a hob and a dishwasher. No circuit can be sized against a guess, so we ask for the list, with model numbers where you have them, before we quote.

What is already there. What feeds the kitchen now, whether the cable is sound and correctly protected, whether the lighting has an earth at every point, and whether the existing circuit has any capacity left. A lot of 1990s kitchens are one tired ring circuit doing the work of four.

The consumer unit. Spare ways, RCD protection, and whether the main fuse can take what is being added. It shapes the price more than anything else here, and we set it out in our extension electrics article and our repair or replace piece.

The room, with the plan on the table. Where the sink and hob sit, which cupboards are integrated, what has to stay reachable, and whether cable can get to where it is needed once there is a solid floor and a run of units against the wall.

Which appliances need a circuit of their own?

The fixed, heavy ones. Most of the rest can share a properly designed kitchen circuit.

• An electric oven, range or hob. A full size oven and almost any induction hob get their own supply, sized against the appliance’s rated load with diversity applied.
• Anything permanently connected and heavy. Electric underfloor heating, a boiling water tap, an air conditioning or heat pump unit.
• The kitchen sockets. A modern kitchen usually gets its own socket circuit rather than sharing the ground floor ring, because the total in one room is high.
• Lighting. Not for load, but because a kitchen ends up with three layers of it, ceiling, under cupboard and something over an island, and they want separate switching.

Here is the part a sales-led quote will not tell you. Putting the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer and the fridge each on a circuit of their own is easy to price and hard to argue with, and it is more than most kitchens need. Appliances of that size are perfectly happy on a well designed kitchen socket circuit through switched fused connection units, and the money that saves usually buys the isolation the kitchen was actually short of.

Where does the isolation go, and why does it matter so much?

Above the worktop, where you can reach it, and it is the thing most often got wrong.

The commonest complaint we hear about a nearly new kitchen is not a fault. It is an integrated dishwasher whose only means of switching off is the socket behind it, under the worktop. When it leaks, somebody has to drag a fitted appliance out of a run of units to make it safe.

The fix is a labelled switched fused connection unit above the worktop for each fixed appliance, planned before the units go in because afterwards there is nowhere to put it. It is the most useful thing to ask for and it is almost never on a kitchen plan.

Two related points. Sockets and switches are normally kept at least 300mm horizontally from a sink or a hob, which is long standing industry guidance rather than a line in the regulations. And socket outlets, along with cables buried in walls, need 30mA RCD protection under BS 7671, which is why the board gets looked at on the first visit rather than the last.

Can the kitchen fitter do the electrics?

Only if they are qualified and registered to certify it, and many are not.

Kitchen fitters are often very good at what they do and some are electricians as well. Plenty are not, and the pattern is the same: a socket gets moved, a spur appears for the dishwasher, the hob gets connected, and there is no certificate for any of it. That surfaces at the point of sale, on the next EICR, or when an insurer asks who did the work.

Agree at the start who is doing which part, and put the electrician in front of the kitchen designer’s drawing before it is signed off. A kitchen plan is a plan of the units. It is not an electrical plan, and the gap is best closed with a pencil rather than by cable pulled to wherever a cupboard turned out not to be. Our kitchen and bathroom electrics page explains how we sit alongside a fitter.

Is kitchen electrical work notifiable, and who certifies it?

Less of it than most websites will tell you, and it is worth knowing the real answer.

A kitchen is not a special location in England and has not been one since April 2013, when any electrical work in a kitchen still had to be notified. The notifiable list in England is now short: a new circuit, a replacement consumer unit, and work on circuits in an actual special location, meaning a room containing a bath or a shower. Moving a socket in a kitchen, on its own, is not notifiable. Wales kept the older rules.

That is not a loophole. It all still has to comply with BS 7671 and it all still has to be tested and certified. It also matters less than it sounds, because almost every genuine refit involves at least one new circuit, and a new circuit is notifiable.

Because we are an NICEIC Approved Contractor we test the work, issue the Electrical Installation Certificate and notify building control ourselves. Smaller alterations get a Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate, the piece of paper people forget to ask for and then need three years later.

What changes the price of the electrical work in a kitchen?

We do not quote kitchen electrics from a description, because the things that move the number are the things a description leaves out.

• The appliance list, and how many of them genuinely need their own supply.
• The consumer unit decision. Spare ways, a small second board, or a replacement.
• How far the kitchen is from the board and what the cable route crosses. A solid concrete floor between the two is a different job to a suspended timber one.
• Whether the walls are coming back to brick or the units go on to existing plaster. Chasing and making good finished walls is most of the labour in a refurbishment.
• Underfloor heating or an island, because an island means a route under the floor agreed before the screed goes down.
• What the survey turns up elsewhere. Kitchens are where missing main bonding and lighting circuits with no earth come to light.

Send the kitchen plan and the appliance list together and we can price it properly, which is why our quotes do not move afterwards. Start on our quote page.

Questions we get asked about this