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• Electrical fitting
• Malmesbury
• Posted 2nd Oct 2012

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The bathroom in our top floor flat is being refurbished. Insulation boards and an under-tile heating cable have been laid and are ready for testing and connection to the mains.

The cable is still exposed and has not been sealed in or tiled over yet. The cable was attached to fibreglass matting but the shape of the bathroom made the matting unusable, so the cable was detached from the matt and laid on its own, but following the manufacturer’s instructions on laying loose portions of the same cable.

All our existing circuits run from a consumer unit, through the roof space and down the internal partition walls which are all metal stud and plasterboard. We have roof space access if we need to run a new circuit back to the consumer unit which is approximately 4 metres away from the thermostat at the opposite end of a corridor. However the consumer unit is on an exterior wall and so the roof space access above it is very restricted. It’s tight to the eaves and enclosed by a fire barrier. It would be quite tricky to get through to the consumer unit position in the roof space, with almost no room to work when you get there. Although obviously we’d prefer not to have a visible cable running down the corridor if we can avoid it.

If possible connecting to an existing circuit via a fused spur would be much easier, but I don’t know if this is allowed? The heating cable is 2 square metres of 150W cable so only 300W. We have an LCD programmable thermostat and a back box for it that hasn’t been fitted yet.

The heating mat cable and sensor have been run back to an approximate thermostat location outside the bathroom. At the moment the cables are just hanging out the wall, we haven’t made any cut-outs in case anything needs to move. The thermostat position is close to various existing circuits which serve the electric central heating, heating programmer, towel rail, sockets etc.

What we need is someone to advise and then make a suitable connection to the mains and test the heating before we tile over it.

Must be part P registered and include to issue the paperwork to building control, and sign off the warranty for the heater.