Garden office?

L

Longtallhowie

Member
Hi,

I'm after a Garden Office/mancave in the back garden, my question is... How easy is it to get power/electric from the house to the garden office? Will I need a qualified electrician? Garden is 90ft long!

Thanks :thumbsup:
 
You'll need armoured cable to run underground to a small consumer unit in the 'cave' then you can run 16 amp ring main and 8 amp lighting cable to sockets, switches just like in the main house. Ideally a feed from a spare 32amp circuit breaker in the house consumer unit would be ideal.

Hope that gives you an idea. You need to do it properly, not just run off an existing socket in the house.
 
You're looking around £200 for armoured cable @90 Ft, a decent garage consumer unit with 1 40amp RCD and 1 32 amp and 1 6 amp RCD about £30, then lets say £8 for each socket box and front and light switch box and front, roughly £15 per 25mt of cable, then another £5 for clips etc.

You'll need to dig the channel in the garden and depending on how easy access is to the house consumer unit, cave etc will determine the labour cost, at worst I'd guess 2 days but it all depends, get some quotes obviously.
 
I used to have a contact for log cabins if that's what you are looking for saw em at a trade show once and they impressed me but it's not something I've really looked into so may be much better ones out there

https://dunsterhouse.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQjw-b2wBRDcrKerwe-S5c4BEiQABprW-CsVHDwEvv-O_GEGnLZLWcXImzEqC7bJCp1NK1obPkEaAmJv8P8HAQ

It was a couple of years ago so don't know if the guy I spoke to still there, but they seemed cheap anyway so maybe worth a look
 
Angie4m said:
Why do I think that PVR will be a good man to answer this?
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I have indeed a number of outbuildings and did exactly as John said after your post.

Remember that armoured cable weighs a ton !!

Whilst digging a trench for that, use the same trench to put in your cat 5 / 6 cable for your network connection (and in my case, I added CCTV shotgun wire as well).
 
pvr said:
Angie4m said:
Why do I think that PVR will be a good man to answer this?
Click to expand...

I have indeed a number of outbuildings and did exactly as John said after your post.

Remember that armoured cable weighs a ton !!

Whilst digging a trench for that, use the same trench to put in your cat 5 / 6 cable for your network connection (and in my case, I added CCTV shotgun wire as well).
Click to expand...

See, I knew you were the man to give expert guidance. As well as John of course
 
Angie, pvr, i didn't intentionally interfere but you never know if a thread might be missed is all, probably should have waited, none intended folks. :thumbsup:
 
Doesn't cat5 cable need 40cm gap between it and electric cable?

What I've been told from people doing our new offices.
 
No, the armoured cable is shielded so no problems there.

I have run cat5 next to armoured in a water mains tube to my main office, and from there to 3 other outbuildings without any issues.
 
85genius said:
I used to have a contact for log cabins if that's what you are looking for saw em at a trade show once and they impressed me but it's not something I've really looked into so may be much better ones out there

https://dunsterhouse.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQjw-b2wBRDcrKerwe-S5c4BEiQABprW-CsVHDwEvv-O_GEGnLZLWcXImzEqC7bJCp1NK1obPkEaAmJv8P8HAQ

It was a couple of years ago so don't know if the guy I spoke to still there, but they seemed cheap anyway so maybe worth a look
Click to expand...

Yep that's where I would get it from, they have a sale on at the moment so a good time to go for it!

:thumbsup:
 
Don't think you'll go wrong especially if they have a sale on can't think of another way to add rooms to your house for so little money. Was really impressed when I saw them a couple of years ago they had a few set up at the excel centre in London, and that was when they had them pretty much bare, once decorated inside it's a proper room
 
pvr said:
No, the armoured cable is shielded so no problems there.

I have run cat5 next to armoured in a water mains tube to my main office, and from there to 3 other outbuildings without any issues.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but the armour on armoured mains cable has virtually no screening effect at higher frequencies as the mesh is too coarse - it should stop some low frequency EMI though

Although the standards say you should maintain (IIRC) 100mm separation, in most environments CAT 5 run alongside mains cable will generally work fine but will usually result in some packet loss and an increased error rate, with both of these increasing as the length that they're run together increases, the lost packets and corrupted packets will result in retransmission giving lower effective bandwidth - which you're unlikely to notice in normal home use.

If you're running a new cable alongside power cables, run CAT 6 the cost difference is small over CAT 5 and CAT 6 has higher maximum bandwidth and improved immunity from external noise.
 
Cat5 / 6 is shielded as well though, my longest run in a single conduit is just under 100 meters with 0 packets loss. In non commercial installations I would never bother with separation of the two.
 
pvr said:
Cat5 / 6 is shielded as well though, my longest run in a single conduit is just under 100 meters with 0 packets loss. In non commercial installations I would never bother with separation of the two.
Click to expand...
Standard CAT 5, CAT5e and CAT 6 cables aren't shielded - although they are all available in foil-shielded versions and CAT 6 cables are more often supplied as the shielded version by default whereas the default for 5/5e tends to be unshielded and you have to be careful to specify shielded if that's what you want. Structured cabling using CAT 5e or CAT 6 will almost certainly be installed using shielded.

It's the twisted pair construction that helps reduce EMI, and CAT 5e and CAT 6 cables have an improved cable twist structure to handle gigabit Ethernet and reject noise so shielded versions aren't always necessary outside of datacentres.
 
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