Electrical design drawings in Islington

A borough of flats: the wiring consequences

Only 16.3 per cent of Islington households live in a house, and just 26.7 per cent own their home. The typical client is therefore a leaseholder, a landlord or a freeholder converting a building, and the electrical work usually touches things other people own: a shared riser, a landlord's supply, a neighbour's ceiling void.

We begin with a survey of the existing intake, meter positions and consumer unit, and we mark which equipment serves your flat alone. New circuits are drawn so each can be isolated without losing the whole flat, and loads are added up so a leaseholder can show the freeholder the supply is not being overdrawn. Where a licence to alter is needed, the same sheets go in the application.

Terraced houses are rarer but valuable: the average terraced price is £1,151,398, and at that level a full rewire is planned as a project, with the existing lath-and-plaster walls and cornices protected where cable routes would otherwise cut across them.

Conservation areas, listed buildings and the visible electrics

Islington has 41 conservation areas, 1,050 listed building entries and 3 registered parks and gardens. Internally, listed status limits where chases and boxes can go: cables cannot be buried through decorative plaster, and surface trunking has to be justified.

In conservation areas the external items are the focus: a meter cabinet on a front wall, a charge point on a street frontage, a camera or security light. We draw each on the elevation so it can be placed, sized and finished to suit. Our architectural drawings in Islington page covers the designations and the borough's design guide, the Islington Urban Design Guide SPD.

The Part P and lighting rules we draw to

Part P covers new circuit; consumer unit replacement; additions or alterations to circuits in a special location, and certification is due within 30 days of completion. The lighting standard is 75 lumens per circuit watt today and 105 under the later edition, so we specify fittings that already meet the higher figure and the drawing does not date.

The set joins your building regulations drawings in Islington and your SAP calculations, which use the same lighting and heating data. For the full scope, see the electrical design drawings hub.

A sensible order of work in an Islington flat

Start with the survey. In a flat above a shop or in a converted townhouse, the first visit establishes where the intake enters, who owns the meter, whether the earth bonding is in place and what the previous owner left behind. Those findings go on the front sheet as assumptions, so the contractor prices from the same facts we drew from.

Next comes the layout. We fix the kitchen and bathroom plans before placing a single socket, then group circuits by use rather than by floor, so a fault on the cooker never takes the fridge with it. Finally the schedule and the schematic are cross-checked against each other, and a second technologist reads the set cold.

How the sheets reach site

After a free constraints check we confirm what is changing, run the survey, draw the sheets and have a second technologist check them against the architectural set. The pack contains a plan for each floor, a schematic and a schedule. You receive a fixed quote before any drawing starts.