What Will it Cost? - Installing Services

The cost of connecting a site to gas, water and electricity can vary widely, depending on what is available and the distances involved. Mark Brinkley reports.

Many self-builders choose to fit their homes out with far more than the basic minimum but, in truth, so too do many professional developers and the bar between essentials and luxuries is being gradually raised all the time. Sometimes this is brought about by changes in the building regulations, more often it is simply fashion at work.

Water

If not already on site, the mains water network can prove to be alarmingly expensive to connect to. A typical fee payable to a water company is between £800 and £1,500 but it can sometimes cost much more, depending largely on the distance to the mains in the road. The local water board’s contracting depart­ment will provide a quote for connec­tion to both water, and the sewer, if one is available, and this should be sought at the earliest stage, preferably before the plot is secured.

Distribution of water around the home is not a major expense: it is largely predicated on the number of taps, which is itself very much down to individual choice. Broadly speak­­ing, each outlet requires piping up and waste provision and, apart from the cost of the actual fittings, you should budget around £200 (half labour, half materials) for every additional hot-plus-cold outlet you specify.

Heating

There are several options available for deliver­ing hot water and space heating in a new house. However, the industry standard of boiler/cylinder/radiators is hard to beat on price: costs work out at around £25-£30/m2, or £4,000-£5,000 on our ‘benchmark’ house. A popular alternative with self-builders is to fit underfloor heating (UFH) in place of radiators. UFH is more expensive, not least because it demands superior controls; typically it adds between £1,000 and £2,500 to the base cost. One compromise is of course to run UFH downstairs and radiators upstairs.

Many people have a desire to harness green technologies for home heating. There are several possibilities: heat pumps, solar hot water panels and combined heat and power (CHP) being the main ones. Solar hot water suffers from only ever being a supplementary heat source — it should provide your hot water needs in summer but maybe not much more. Ground source heat pumps, which produce three to four times more power than they consume, are a good option with low temper­ature systems such as UFH but are around twice the price of conventional boiler-based systems. CHP offers a boiler that also produces electricity: again installation prices are high compared with conventional systems.

Electrics

Like water companies, electricity companies have regional monopolies and have an unfor­tunate practice of charging very high fees for new installations. Expect to pay several hundred pounds if the connection is simple, possibly stretching to many thousands if there are complications (distance being one, but also having to move overhead cables). Again, a quotation should be sought as early as possible, preferably before buying the plot to avoid shocks later on.

The cost of wiring a house for power and light is closely related to the floor area: a unit cost of £20/m2 is a good starting out point. For this, you would be able to install a basic pendant lighting system, several power sockets in each room, plus kitchen and heating wiring, and the mandatory smoke detectors.

The addition of more expensive fittings and low-voltage downlighter schemes pushes the cost up towards the £30/m2 mark. The elec­trician’s bill for our test house, which included downlighters in every room, was just under £5,000 or £25/m2.

Structured Cabling

Bell wires and phone cabling have been a standard fixture in UK homes for decades but in the past five years we have seen the introduction of data cabling, as used in many offices. The actual cabling costs are similar to normal electrical wiring but the star configura­tions used involve greater cable lengths and more time on installation. However, most houses can be data cabled professionally for some­where between £1,000 and £2,000, including the terminals.

Some of the more specialised applications that use data cabling, such as whole-house audio or scene lighting, are very expensive indeed. Home automation as such lies beyond the scope of this article but it tends to be the province of the dedicated specialist rather than the more conventional builder.

Getting a phone line into a new property is still usually down to British Telecom, although some regional cable companies also offer telephone line connections as part of a cable television connection.

Oil or Gas

If mains gas is available, it is usually fairly inexpensive to install — the suppliers are keen to have new customers, as there is some choice in the matter. If not, most people opt for heating oil which, despite the recent price rises, remains a comparatively cheap fuel. The main alternative is liquid petroleum gas (LPG) which is more expensive than natural gas: both oil and LPG require on-site storage, covered by a raft of regulations (Part J).

These fossil fuels are conventionally used for heating and for cooking. You can specify elec­tricity as an alternative power source for all these applications. It’s relatively expensive but it can, increasingly, be drawn from renewable sources both on site and via the grid using specialised suppliers.

Sprinklers

The use of sprinklers in the home is uncom­mon in the UK but is set to grow with muted changes to the fire regulations that will relax some requirements if sprinklers are present. A well-designed sprinkler system can deliver 60lts/minute, which ideally requires a 32mm feed into the house. Ballpark cost is £15/m2 or £200 per outlet — a 100mm white disc in the ceiling is all that is seen.

Central Vacuum Systems

Widely used in Canada, their uptake in the UK is almost entirely restricted to the self-build sector where they have a small but vociferous fan base. The large motor ideally needs to be housed somewhere outside the house — the garage is seen as an ideal spot. Then the operation is almost silent. The big plus is that the vacuumed dust is completely drawn out of the house: in contrast, portable cleaners tend to blow back out the fine particles not trapped by the filter. Installation costs tend to start at around £500.

About These Articles

This series is based on a typically constructed, 4/5 bedroom house, with an internal floor area of 200m2 (2,150 sq ft) plus an integral garage. Its raw build cost (that is only labour and materials) is £135,000. Professional fees, contractors’ overheads and profit, insurances and warranties would all be in addition to this. The raw build cost presumes a straightforward job finished to a fairly basic standard; the sort of finish you would expect from a professional housebuilder. In this series we will be looking at how the costs break down for all the various component parts of a house, and looking at the cost implications of choosing alternatives. This house is also featured in Mark Brinkley’s latest book, The Housebuilder's Bible (6th edition).

OTHER COST GUIDES:

• Getting out of the ground
• Insulation
• External Joinery
• Constructing Walls
• Roofing
• Internal Finishes