The wiring in my elderly mothers' house is equally as elderly but at least has red/black T&E and not old rubber sheathed stuff. The CU is an old fused unit. She needs a power socket by the telephone socket to feed her CareAlarm unit. The best option that I can see is for an electician to simply (?) add a radial circuit from the CU to a fixed 13A socket mounted in the under-stairs cupboard where the CU is located.

Then her oddjob man can drill a hole in the cupboard and run a thinner extension cable and fix it around the skirting etc to an extension mains socket nearer the phone, plugging said extension cable into the new understairs socket with a 2A fused plug.  Or would a fused spur be more sensible?

Why not run the new circuit all the way to the phone, I hear you ask?  Mother fusses about wire visibility etc and although one can get white T&E, I'm guessing that it still has to be 2.5mm and so more visible then white/cream flex.

Question...will a sparky add in the radial cable or say no, the whole thing needs a rewire which is out of the question.

Thanks for that. It will be surface wired so an RCD socket outlet will work.

What will happen if, as I suspect, there isn't much evidence of any main bonding etc. ?

Quote:



 Is there any other type ?  

CWatters wrote on Oct 9^th, 2009, 7:48pm:


Nice bit of lateral thinking there. Unfortunately when they wired the house sockets must have been like gold dust as there isn't single socket anywhere in the downstairs hallway!

CWatters wrote on Oct 10^th, 2009, 8:27pm:


It is the best place because it has a built-in microphone and loudseaker, the theory being that if she takes atumble, she presses her button hanging on a cord around her neck, whih triggers the unit to dial up the control centre. Then the operator tries to speak to her via the box. That's the theory.