Temporary electrical supply

[MarkW1979]

I’m hoping to break ground for our 4 bed timber kit build this year. I have (hopefully not too silly a question) regarding a temporary electrical supply. The family have a house right next to the plot so in theory it might not be too difficult to run a few extension cables from the house, this would mean that once the superstructure is up the consumer unit and electrical gubbins can go straight to it’s final place without having to build the temporary unit and move it. Is this feasible/sensible?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Mark

[Kelvin]

Running extension cables across the ground or even in a trench on a building site isn’t a great idea.
 

What a lot of us have done is rather than creating a temporary electricity supply on the plot then moving it to the house (so increasing the cost) we just build a permanent kiosk/meter box on the perimeter out of the way and leave the meter and fuse there then run SWA to the house. It’s what I’ve done and it’s worked out a very cost effective solution for us. My kiosk has the meter, fuse, a small CU, and four 3 pin plug sockets. 

[ProDave]

At some point you have to get the permanent supply in.  There are 3 ways to achieve this.

 

1) get the supply connected on site now to a kiosk on the site boundary, use that for the temporary supply and keep the kiosk there when complete and run your own cable from the kiosk to the house.  This is what we did.

 

2) get a temporary supply fitted in a kiosk and later get the supply company to move the supply to the house.  There is an extra cost to move the supply.

 

3) (which is what you are talking about) manage with borrowed power from next door until the house shell is ready then get the permanent supply connected to the house.

 

Option 3 would require you to be doing ground works for the electrics later than most of the other ground works so you might want to at least install black ducting for the house supply sooner to avoid late ground works.

[Conor]

Nope, not a good idea. Do you think your insurance will cover you if somebody gets electrocuted? And will look interesting on your site risk assessment 🤣

 

Getting services on to site is a ballache. Get started soon as possible. Approach your DNO and get a tempory supply put in to a kisok. Then you get them back to bring the remaining cable from the kiosk to your perm meter box. It'll cost a little more than a single application but it'll make life so much easier.

 

Other option is to ask can you do without electric at all until you've walls up?

 

Get water and sewer sorted as well, these can all take 6months +

[Kelvin]

Good advice on the timing. It took 7 months from beginning to end to get my supply connected including the meter installation. The sooner you get on with some of the stuff the better. 

[Alan Ambrose]

Another option might be to run temporary swa cable from your existing consumer unit via  a new breaker/mcb/rcbo/rcb. This can go to a small temporary cu inside the building or a little ‘distribution point’ with a bunch of metalclad sockets. All in a temporary enclosure. Think typical supply for a shed / outbuilding. Probably a job for a friendly sparks.

[MarkW1979]

Thanks guys. You know when you ask if something is sensible it almost certainly isn’t. Cheers

[Blooda]

2 hours ago, Kelvin said:

Good advice on the timing. It took 7 months from beginning to end to get my supply connected including the meter installation. The sooner you get on with some of the stuff the better. 

We applied in November 2019 and was finally connected October 2020; meter installed a few weeks later in November, delayed as we had to go through the obligatory guy turning up who "was not qualified to work on 3 Phase meters".  We were at first fix stage by then so the supply went straight to the cabinet.  We managed with a little petrol generator up till then, which we hardly needed mainly for the Hoover and ironically for the trades to charge their batteries !