ronaldgibbons Posted January 19, 2021 Share Posted January 19, 2021 Hi there. I'm in the final stages of purchasing a building plot. I've sent off the online application to get my estimate from SSE regarding the cost of connection to the electricity grid and it can take 2 weeks. I can't wait that long thinking about the potentially horrific cost. Could anyone with a cup half full outlook give an idea of what it could cost based on a description? So the plot is at the end of a row of houses. The electricity poles are on the opposite side of the road. The supply cable crosses the road from the last pole and into the last house. After the last house there is a privately owned track then the plot. I'd estimate the distance between the last pole and the nearest piece of the plot to be 60m I've tried a couple of the power companies online estimators but I can't believe it could cost that much (in excess of £15,000). Surely not. Thanks, Jonny. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 19, 2021 Share Posted January 19, 2021 It all depends on wayleaves and ownership of land it has to cross. Work on a new cable coming under the road, including a road crossing and your £15K could well be true, but it might be less. You also need to find the cost of a water connection, that might be another shock. Why can't you wait? Don't be bullied into completing on the purchase until you are satisfied. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thedreamer Posted January 19, 2021 Share Posted January 19, 2021 One assumption that should not be made at this stage is that you can obtain electricity from the last pole. For our build we had to go back to the transformer 220 meters away, through some trees, bedrock and a road. The other pole was on our land. Electricity connections are horrible, best to get it done at the earliest possible stage. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mugwanya Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 I've been quoted nearly£24,000 for my supply. The nearest supply, the next door neighbour, is 30m away and there is an unused 3 phase cable at that point. On the excellent advice of people on this forum I pursued getting a grid connection, despite my feeling that it was a rip-off, but then they said that it couldn't be installed until later in the year. So I gave up, and am going off-grid. I had already budgeted £10k for the solar to run alongside the grid, up that to £22k and I have solar capacity to run the house for most of the year plus a generator for the days I need it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TonyT Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 Get a second quote, you can get a private utility company to do the work , following the local electricity company specifications. depending on what they have to connect to to energise the supply company may have to do the point of connection, they may not 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronaldgibbons Posted January 20, 2021 Author Share Posted January 20, 2021 This is a long shot but during my research I read about someone who had Power company hardware on land they owned and had never thought about wayleaves. During negotiations over their excessive quote they told the company that if they didn't reduce the quote considerably then they wanted the equipment removed immediately. Apparently this worked. It got me thinking about the cable that runs under my driveway and the one that runs through my loft to next door. Any other ideas for ways that I can blackmail them during negotiations? On 19/01/2021 at 21:09, ProDave said: It all depends on wayleaves and ownership of land it has to cross. Work on a new cable coming under the road, including a road crossing and your £15K could well be true, but it might be less. You also need to find the cost of a water connection, that might be another shock. Why can't you wait? Don't be bullied into completing on the purchase until you are satisfied. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mugwanya Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 23 hours ago, TonyT said: Get a second quote, you can get a private utility company to do the work , following the local electricity company specifications. depending on what they have to connect to to energise the supply company may have to do the point of connection, they may not They did send me a list of about 30 companies who could do the work. I gave up after ringing 18 of them, all of whom said that the job was too small. The others on the list looked like they would have said the same thing i.e. had websites boasting about how many big projects they'd done, with nothing about one off connections. I will say that the gas quote was a lot more realistic (in terms of my budget), hence opting for a gas generator. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronaldgibbons Posted January 21, 2021 Author Share Posted January 21, 2021 I've driven around the area to have a look at the poles and cables. Mostly there's a pole every 40m or so along the roads here, each pole serves 1 or 2 houses each, criss-crossing the road whenever it's needed. Sometimes the poles carry the broadband cable too. I'm guessing that if SSE are going to continue this method and there's capacity then they'll use another 2 poles to bring the cables up level to my plot then cross the road, put a pole on the plot and run the cable for 30m underground to the house site. Any ideas of the cost for this? The land on the other side of the road is privately owned by a large landowner, it's used for forestry and he owns thousands of acres. It's unlikely he would object but I'm wondering if the verge of a road where the poles are is public land anyway so there's no need to worry about wayleaves? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe90 Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 1 hour ago, ronaldgibbons said: I'm wondering if the verge of a road where the poles are is public land anyway so there's no need to worry about wayleaves? During my planning fight I did establish that the verge is part of the highway, historically it was the pavement, or old equivalent. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Temp Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 (edited) Awhile back i found this doc that has a lot of pricing data in but its horrible to extract. Perhaps start around page 125 and see. https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/internet/en/about-us/regulatory-information/documents/UKPN%20CCCMS%20-%20July%202018%20v1.0%20PXM%202018-06-27.pdf Looks like £2000 to £3400 for each new pole and length of cable between poles £1700 to go from pole to underground and first 10m of cable Trenching and cable. From £130/m in grass to £330/m in road Edited January 21, 2021 by Temp 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronaldgibbons Posted February 19, 2021 Author Share Posted February 19, 2021 Hi there, so if anyone's interested the estimate for connection was £3500. As someone mentioned before this is for connection only. There's around 70m of trenching to be excavated and trunking laid by me with the digging to be done by hand 9m from the pole. I'm happy with this, hopefully there's no surprises when I'm assigned my engineer to give the detailed quote and the landowner is okay with the trench running along his side of the road for 40m. He owns thousands of acres in the area so hopefully he'll be reasonable. One interesting thing I found out was a quote I got for impact moleing the cables under the road 4m to the plot which was £1800 and an estimate of £15,000 to take them underground the full 70m. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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