You’ve spent weeks choosing kitchen tiles. The bathroom fixtures went through three rounds of revision. Paint colours have been debated, samples tested on walls, opinions gathered from anyone willing to offer one. This is normal. Renovations involve countless visible decisions, and those decisions deserve care.
Then someone asks about the electrical work and the answer is usually some variation of ‘add sockets where we need them.’ Maybe a note about moving a light switch. Perhaps a vague intention to ‘upgrade things while we’re at it.’ The contrast is striking. Hours on aesthetics, minutes on infrastructure.
This isn’t entirely unreasonable. Electrical systems disappear once walls close up. Nobody admires your circuit separation at a dinner party. But what’s behind those walls determines what your home can actually do, how safely it operates, and whether you’ll be opening those walls again in five years when your requirements change.
The Consumer Unit Question
Start with the box that everything else depends on. Your consumer unit, sometimes still called the fuse board, is the heart of your electrical system. Every circuit in your home originates there. And in many Dublin properties, particularly those built before the 1990s, that consumer unit was sized for a different era.
Think about what homes contained then versus now. No home offices with multiple monitors and equipment. No thoughts of electric vehicle charging. Heating was gas or oil, not electricity. Kitchens had a fraction of the appliances they contain today. The consumer unit was adequate for that world. It may not be adequate for yours.
Adding an extension, converting a garage, or installing an EV charger can exceed available capacity. When that happens, you face circuits that trip under normal use, electricians who won’t certify new work connected to an inadequate board, and limitations on what you can actually do with your renovated space. Addressing capacity during renovation is straightforward. Addressing it afterwards means additional disruption and cost. The Safe Electric register lists registered contractors who can assess whether your existing board needs upgrading as part of your project.
How Circuits Are Organised
Older installations often grouped circuits in ways that made sense economically but create problems practically. A kitchen sharing a ring main with half the ground floor. Lighting for the entire house on a single circuit. Sockets in bathrooms and utility rooms without dedicated RCD protection. These configurations were compliant when installed. Standards have moved on.
The practical issue is fault isolation. When one circuit covers too much territory, a problem anywhere trips power to multiple rooms. Your freezer shares a circuit with your home office, and a fault in one affects both. Modern practice separates circuits more granularly. Kitchen appliances on dedicated circuits. Lighting split across multiple circuits so a single fault doesn’t plunge the house into darkness. Wet areas with appropriate protection.
During renovation, you have the opportunity to reorganise circuit structure. This isn’t about gold-plating the installation. It’s about building something that’s safer, easier to maintain, and won’t frustrate you every time something trips. Reputable electricians use professional testing equipment to verify their work meets standards. Suppliers like Fluke supplier Testers.ie equip contractors with the instruments needed for accurate fault-finding and certification.
Planning for What You Don’t Have Yet
Renovation plans typically address current requirements. You need sockets here for the kitchen appliances you own now. You need lighting where you’ll place furniture in the arrangement you’re planning. This is logical but limited.
Consider what might change. Electric vehicle ownership is growing rapidly. Even if you don’t own one now, the ability to charge at home affects resale value. Heat pumps and electrified heating systems draw significant power and may require dedicated supply. Home offices have evolved from a laptop on a desk to setups that justify their own circuits. Smart home systems accumulate.
Running cables during renovation is cheap. The walls are open, the electrician is on site, the incremental cost of additional runs is minimal. Running those same cables after plasterboard goes up means disruption, making good, and significant expense. The question isn’t whether you need EV charging now. It’s whether installing the infrastructure now costs less than retrofitting later. Usually it does. This connects to broader thinking about electrical planning that adds long-term value rather than just solving immediate problems.
What Certification Actually Means
Any notifiable electrical work in a domestic property requires certification. An Electrical Installation Certificate for new installations or significant alterations. A Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate for smaller modifications. These documents confirm that work has been tested and meets current standards.
This isn’t bureaucratic formality. Certification provides evidence that a qualified person has verified the installation. Without it, you have no independent confirmation that the work is safe. Insurance policies may have clauses about electrical work being properly certified. Selling a property with recent electrical modifications and no certification creates complications. The Health and Safety Authority provides broader context on electrical safety obligations, but the immediate point is simpler: ensure whoever does your electrical work provides proper certification.
Ask about this before work begins, not after it’s complete. A contractor who’s vague about certification is telling you something about how they operate.
Talking to Your Electrician
The typical homeowner conversation with an electrician goes something like: ‘We’re doing an extension, we need sockets and lights, can you quote?’ This gets you a quote for sockets and lights. It doesn’t necessarily get you advice on whether that approach makes sense.
Ask better questions. What capacity does the existing installation have? Does the consumer unit need upgrading to support the new work? How are you planning to separate circuits? What RCD protection will be in place? Are there provisions we should make for future requirements even if we’re not installing them now?
A good electrician will engage with these questions. They’ll explain their reasoning, offer options, help you understand trade-offs. They’ll appreciate that you’re thinking beyond the minimum specification. A contractor who brushes these off or can’t articulate why they’re making particular choices may not be the right fit for your project.
You don’t need to understand electrical regulations in detail. You do need to know enough to ask whether your project is being approached thoughtfully or just mechanically.
The Window That Closes
Renovation creates a temporary opportunity. Walls are open. Contractors are on site. Changes that would be disruptive and expensive under normal circumstances can be made relatively easily. This window doesn’t stay open indefinitely.
Once plasterboard goes up and decoration is complete, electrical modifications mean damage, repair, and disruption. The extension that could have had EV charging infrastructure installed for a few hundred euros now needs walls opened, cables run, and everything made good. The consumer unit that should have been upgraded during the project now requires its own separate intervention.
This doesn’t mean installing everything you might conceivably need. It means thinking through what would be difficult to add later and making conscious decisions about whether to include it now. Even running empty conduit to locations where you might want future capacity is far cheaper during renovation than retrofitting later.
The tiles and paint colours matter. They’re what you’ll see every day. But the infrastructure behind the walls determines what your home can do for years to come. Both deserve proper attention during renovation planning. One of them is much harder to change your mind about later.