electrical wires / plasterboard

[bobbins]

Hi,

Complete novice here.

I want to hang some shelves up in my utility room but need some advice please.  A few months ago I had the misfortune of drilling through a rubber water pipe, so I decided to purchase a pipe/wire detector.  I have scanned the area and there seem to be wires everywhere.  Question is, how far back should the electrical wires be from the plasterboard?

Thanks

 

[Geoff1946]

Sadly, they are very likely to be immediately behind the plasterboard.    However, if the plasterboard is the foil backed type then the readings could be misleading, indicating more cables than really exist.  One way is to gently probe a hole through the plasterboard with a small screwdriver, then after ensuring contact with only concrete block use the drill.

Note that cables are only supposed to run straight up or down from socket outlets or in the corners of rooms, but this is a regulation which is often  flouted.

 

[SPECIAL LOCATION]

Hi,

Complete novice here.

I want to hang some shelves up in my utility room but need some advice please.  A few months ago I had the misfortune of drilling through a rubber water pipe, so I decided to purchase a pipe/wire detector.  I have scanned the area and there seem to be wires everywhere.  Question is, how far back should the electrical wires be from the plasterboard?

Thanks

Hello Bobbins..  welcome to the forum..

A lot of these DIY pipe/cable detectors are a bit hit & miss in their accuracy and ability to detect anything you genuinely want to find..

They can sometimes be ok at detecting metal cable-capping..

But they can often fail trying to find cables alone with no metal capping..

(often newer-builds have no cable capping, just clipped behind plasterboard that has been stuck to the wall

How old is the property & what type of wall is it?

If it is a relatively modern house then as Geoff said, the cables should be run vertically or horizontally in line with sockets or switches..

But older properties can be here-there-&-anywhere, diagonally and all over the place!!!

If its a stud-wall, (hollow type with wooden stud-work holding the plasterboard) you could be detecting plasterboard nails   

OR.. some more modern building techniques use a metal framework to support the plaster-board wall..

which sends cable detectors mental as there is so much metal behind the plasterboard!!

To answer your specific question there is NO set depth at which a cable should be buried or not behind plaster!   

(but there are some types of protective measures that should be applied to cables at certain depths).

The basic rules of thumb are:-

DONT go drilling vertically above a socket or light switch...

Or above or below a wall light..

Or horizontally in line with any sockets, switches, wall lights!

 

[boltonsparky]

This picture should help illustrate but as mentioned they're not always installed in the zones. The old favourite was the diagonal cable down from the cooker switch to the outlet. 

I hate drilling plastered walls. I went through a hidden gas pipe years ago, a 6mm hole through the centre of a 22mm gas pipe which has put me off for life. Even the gas engineer was puzzled by what it was doing there. 

As mentioned above following the detectors you'd never drill anywhere. 

 

[phil d]

One of the biggest problems with diy electrics for me is the way people do things, they seem to buy exactly the length they need, or think they need, and no more. So they decide lets say that they're going to spur off a socket to feed another one and measure the length they need and they buy it, they forget going around things, and such under the floor or in the walls, when they find the cable is too short they invariably drag it into whatever position they can to make it reach. Whenever I used to get mates coming round scrounging a length of cable to add a socket I used to ask how much cable they needed and if they said say 3m then I'd give them 5m. It was surprising later how many of them would comment that they only just had enough cable, and that was with the extra I'd given them.

One rather disturbing new trend is with running pipes to radiators, with the increased use of plastic pipes it's more and more common to find the pipes running down the wall in the middle of the radiator and then bending out to each end, and since they are not metallic you can't find them with a detector, as a mate of mine found out when he drilled straight through one!