i added an external AC and this has opened up can of worms. Theyre saying it cant be plugged in to socket. But it cant be wired back to the fuse box since its too old. And they wont replace the fuse box without rewiring entire house. Its ridiculous
This would have been raised before the AC was installed, and clearly they will not install it if the supply is not suitable, this includes the fuse size, it does I know seem wrong, the whole idea of inventing the 13 amp socket was so the post war homes could be electrically heated, and to be fair using a couple of oil filled radiators and moving them room to room as required works, so why not a heat pump, which should use less power?
Well in the main as we are trying to heat/cool whole house, and within a set time frame. My central heating boiler is 20 kW, ample to maintain the home temperature, but we don't maintain the temperature, but allow it to cool over night or when out, so looking at recovery time, and at work they have one hour to get offices to temperature so seems reasonable that at home we can reheat a room in an hour, and one room yes, whole house no, so I heat rooms in sequence.
So really looking for more than 20 kW, so a heat pump for this house looking at some where around the 10 kW or more, so convert to amps, around 44 amp. And the supply fuse is 60 amp, so if using a heat pump, could not also use the electric showers, as would be over the 60 amp.
So this house would need the supply upgrading to 100 amp, and to do that the consumer unit would not be big enough, I can get 22 amp from the solar, and so a 100 amp DNO fuse would mean I could be using 122 amp, so would need to install a fuse to limit supply to consumer unit.
The solar has already resulted in a second consumer unit, but this would not impact on the house wiring, all required would be local to the flat where the grid supply, solar supply and battery are located.
Now dads house built 1954 had rubber insulated cable which had started to crumble. So in that case a full rewire was required, but this had nothing to do with the new kitchen or wet room, it simply needed doing, I did do it after his death, but it should have been done earlier. However we could not force him, we had to find ways around the problem, like a mini consumer unit in the kitchen from a SWA cable run around outside of house, not ideal, but he had dug his heals in, and said I am not living in a building site, you can do it when I'm dead, which is what happened.
So big question is was it wired before or after 1966? The time 1954 to 1966 what when we used rubber cable, so had that house been 15 years younger there would have been no problem. Although my dads DIY had not helped.
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