electricity design home

How to Plan the Electrics when Designing a New Home

Ian Mutuli
Updated on
Ian Mutuli

Ian Mutuli

Founder and Managing Editor of Archute. He is also a graduate architect from The University of Nairobi, Kenya.
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There’s nothing quite like the idea of designing and building your own home. Everything can be exactly how you want it to be and your imagination (and your budget) is the limit. There are so many things you need to consider, and you’ll soon discover that unless you spend some time listing and planning each one, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed. One of the first things you should spend time on is the electrics of your new home. Here are a few of the many things that there are to consider when you get to the design phase of your electrics.

Spend a Lot of Time Thinking About Outlets

We all own a fair number of extension leads thanks to the positioning of our house power outlets and we’ve all wished the locations of these outlets were better thought out. When you’re designing your own home, you have no excuse not to have these outlets exactly where you want them. Know where you’re going to position your television or broadband router and plan to have an outlet near it.

Once you’ve marked where you’d like the outlets, sit down with an electrician and go through their locations. They will offer valuable advice based on their experiences and incorporate your wants with their suggestions.

Put Efficiency First

One of the biggest buzzwords of the moment is global warming and the idea of going green can be applied to your new home build. Not only will the energy efficiency of appliances and electrical installations save you money long term, they’ll contribute to the sustainability of our environment.

Consider ensuring any big home installations like heating and cooling systems are energy efficient or go further and consider augmenting traditional power by installing solar panels on the roof. Don’t forget other energy guzzlers like the swimming pool pump. Top it all off with energy-efficient lightbulbs.

Include a Little Bit of Automation

Automating some of the electrics in your home will add to the energy saving you’ll be accomplishing by designing your home with efficiency in mind. Controlling your irrigation system or pool pump to only run at certain times of the day will decrease energy use dramatically and can be built into your electric design.

Go a step further and add light timers to turn on and off lights around the home to even further save power. Do the same to your hot water geyser if it is an electric one.

Get Everything Checked by Professionals

Once you’ve made all your plans and executed them, call in Trade Facilities Services, a professional consultancy to test, check and issue an Electrical Safety Certificate. This will ensure all your electrics are to code and correctly installed and you can sleep easy knowing all your hard work is protected with a safe and expertly checked electrical installation.

Now that you’ve got all your electrics planned for your new house, you can move on to more exciting things like interior design or paint colour choices and start to dream about all the memories you’re going to make in your new home.

Ian Mutuli

About the author

Ian Mutuli

Founder and Managing Editor of Archute. He is also a graduate architect from The University of Nairobi, Kenya.
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