Electricity and electrical installations when renovating property in France

Electricity - Designing your Layout

The best approach to take when defining your electrical wiring requirements is to start with a large sheet of paper with a floor plan of your property.

First you can mark on all the 'critical' sockets. These will include the sockets for appliances such as oven, washing machine, dishwasher, fridges and freezers, central heating boiler, kitchen 'above the work-surface' appliances, and so on. The positioning of these will need to be marked very accurately, and since they need dedicated electricity supplies from the main distribution box it is not possible to simply use 'any old socket'.

Second item to add is general electrical sockets. In the US these are simply added every two metres or so, in the UK they are added wherever they might be necessary, and in France they are usually kept to a bare minimum. At this stage you will not have decided the exact placement of every cupboard and bedside table, so it is best to include several in each room.

French electricians will usually still think you are confused if you ask for more than three single sockets in a room, but stick with it. Very few houses end up with too many electrical sockets, but many have too few. It costs little extra to have additional sockets or to have a double instead of a single, and is much easier if you get it right at the time of installation.

Next, you can add the lighting. This is more complicated that you expect. As a minimum you will simply have a central light in each room, with a switch by the door, and rely on the sockets for lamps. But usually there is a need for wall lights, halogen lights, bathroom lights that need to be on a separate circuit etc.

The complication comes when you try and define the placement of the switches. Most rooms need more than one light and more than one light switch. There will often be two entry / exit points to a room, sometimes several (eg a landing area). Our kitchen has a front door, a back door and an internal doorway through to a lobby for example, and the lobby then accesses the stairs and various bedrooms.

The best approach is to mark every doorway, and also the top and bottom of the stairs, on to your plan, and decide which lights should be operated from that point. If you want the bedroom lights to be operable from the bedside these will need to be included as well.

Note that a light can be turned on and off from as many places as you want - we have a landing light that is independently controlled by five separate switches (two next to bedroom doors, one at the top of the stairs, one at the bottom of the stairs, and one on an external doorway).

One problem you may encounter is that beamed ceilings do not lend themselves well to central lights. Therefore you may prefer to have wall lights operated by the main switch instead. One other option is to have a 'lamp lighting' circuit. You can have a main room light switch that controls a series of ordinary plug sockets, so that when you turn the main switch on, a series of lamps all turn on at the same time (rather than a central light).

 

External electricity

Now that the main plan is finished you will need to consider any external electrical requirements. These will usually include:

External Lighting: terrace, porch, property entrance and so on

External electricity: it is always useful to have one or more external electricity supplies

Swimming pool: a swimming pool pump needs its own separate supply of electricity

Annexe rooms and Outbuildings: many French properties have a cave (cellar), and a selection of garages and outbuildings.

Add all these to your plan, according to your own requirements.

One thing to remember from an early stage is that external electricity supplies are usually buried in the ground. This will need a trench 60 cm deep to be dug, so if possible avoid traversing septic tanks, existing buried water pipes and so on.