​How To Get Electricity Into Your Garden Building

Installing electricity into your garden building adds an extra level of practicality and comfort. It should be seriously considered during the design of your building (as it is more complicated after construction). Many people are using garden buildings as offices for their business which requires additional functionality such as Wi-Fi and electricity. To learn more about Wi-Fi access for garden buildings, you can read our related article How To Extend Wifi To Your Garden Office.

There are two aspects that you need to consider:

• The wiring and installation of sockets and switches within the building.
• Getting the supply of electricity from the house/property to the garden building itself. We would always recommend a 32A 30mA RCD Protected Supply for our garden buildings. A 6mm SWA Cable would normally be large enough pending the length of cable run. 

We offer an electrical pack as an optional extra in our range of Garden Sheds, Summerhouses, Garden Studios & Offices and Timber Garages - but are standard in our Garden Rooms, which contains a number of electric sockets and switches. This is installed at the time of construction by our professional electricians and cannot be added retrospectively by us. Unfortunately, we do not offer a service to install the power from your house to the garden building. This is something that you will need to arrange directly with a qualified electrician. However, it is not essential that this is completed prior to installation of the building.

How Do I Get The Electricity Running To My Garden Building?

In short, an armoured cable has to be connected directly from your main house supply to the garden building. This should (ideally) be buried under the ground and hooked up through a consumer unit installed in the garden building.

Supplying electricity from your house to your shed is something that you should never attempt yourself (unless you are a qualified electrician). It requires professional, technical expertise to correctly calculate resistance and to ensure that it falls within the specification of Part P Electrical Safety work regulations. Although a little complex, it is not particularly time intensive, so it should not be very expensive to complete.

Can I Reduce The Cost?

There are many things you can do yourself to keep installation and maintenance costs down.

Running the armoured cable underground from your house to your shed requires a 600mm trench to be dug. This will be one of the more costly aspects to the job, so when getting a quote from an electrician be sure to mention if you are prepared to dig the trench yourself.

What Needs To Be Done Now?

If you have completed the trench yourself, then the electrician can begin the main work immediately. Changes may need to be made to your fuse box to manage the additional power draw and a residual circuit breaker (RCB) may be added for extra safety. The cable will be wired into the main fuse box in your house and laid in the trench. All that remains is to hook the wire up to the sub panel in our pre-installed electrical pack and the job is complete.

Costs will vary depending on the distance the cable needs to cover between the house and garden building. Also, after the job is completed you will need to obtain a Certificate of Work. This is especially important if you come to sell your house and acts as your P certification for legal purposes. Uncertified electrical work of this nature can lead to a fine of up to £5,000 in some cases.

Summary

Our garden buildings are perfectly adaptable into comfortable garden office so working from home remains productive and effortless. Our electrical pack takes out the hard work of setting it up.

For more information about the electrical packs we can install in our buildings, please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Please note that electrical packs cannot be retrospectively installed and should be included at the time of construction. If you would like to find out more about our eletrical pack and would like to include in your garden building design, please get in touch with our knowledgable advisors.