Do I need an electrician? (lighting circuit)

mark88

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I'm boarding the loft out, before the boards go down I wanted to move a couple ceiling lights to the center of the rooms(currently not centered) and remove the pull switches that are in each bedroom.

I'm quite at home with ring mains, and thought it was be quite straight forward to remove the pull switches and get on with the boarding but the whole lightcircuit upstairs has me stumped. :facepalm:

Firstly, there's 3 different types of cables being used. There's the normal 1.5mm grey twin(but no earth), there's also a smaller grey twin cable with 2 cores and the cores aren't solid. Finally there's a tiny grey cable containing a 1.5mm solid live.

Do regs allow non solid cable to be used?

What's really confused me is that from up in the loft I can clearly see 4 cables going down to the lights switches in bedroom 1 and 2 (they back onto each other). But when I open these switches, each one has 3 cables coming DOWN to it. (2 orange, 1 grey in my diagram). I have no clue where the extra cable in each switch is coming from.

There's also 5 cables going to the bathroom pullswitch, seems a lot.

So, looking at the diagram, does it look straight forward to you? If it does, then perhaps I'm just not that great with lighting and should stick to mains.
 

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I'm boarding the loft out, before the boards go down I wanted to move a couple ceiling lights to the center of the rooms(currently not centered) and remove the pull switches that are in each bedroom.

I'm quite at home with ring mains, and thought it was be quite straight forward to remove the pull switches and get on with the boarding but the whole lightcircuit upstairs has me stumped. :facepalm:

Firstly, there's 3 different types of cables being used. There's the normal 1.5mm grey twin(but no earth), there's also a smaller grey twin cable with 2 cores and the cores aren't solid. Finally there's a tiny grey cable containing a 1.5mm solid live.

Do regs allow non solid cable to be used?

What's really confused me is that from up in the loft I can clearly see 4 cables going down to the lights switches in bedroom 1 and 2 (they back onto each other). But when I open these switches, each one has 3 cables coming DOWN to it. (2 orange, 1 grey in my diagram). I have no clue where the extra cable in each switch is coming from.

There's also 5 cables going to the bathroom pullswitch, seems a lot.

So, looking at the diagram, does it look straight forward to you? If it does, then perhaps I'm just not that great with lighting and should stick to mains.

Get a sparky in ! Personally I'm terrified of electrics, gas and water ! Leave it to the pro's. Keep you and your family safe.
 
west yorks...

I've studied it and reckon I could rewire it, to simplify things. The only things got me head scratching are the 3 cables to the wall switches in bedrooms 1 and 2, and the single core cable going to a 2 way wall switch on the landing.
 
Im guessing its an oldish house ??!! My parents had similar wiring (smallnround cables rather than the larger oval cable you now get).

You have the switch cable with no earth, and a common live normally on its own that takes its own direction and interlinks multiple light fittings and junction boxes and it can get very confusing especially if other individual wires are linked into switches to control other sections of the circuit !!

Really its up to you if you wish to continue using the existing cable if you can work out the direction of the common lives and other wiring, otherwise you can look to change the cabling to new 1.5mm twin and earth and run a loop-in wiring circuit for those bedrooms.
 

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