Garden room - options for dealing with cabling

3DataModem · 19-07-2021 5:59am #1

I have had a garden room installed, and the electricians working for the contractor put in an armoured cable run around the edge of our house on the assumption that it would be buried under the patio and synthetic grass.

The contractor has now come by and realised that pulling up the flagstones will be a nightmare as they are concreted in, and pulling up the edge of the synthetic grass will also be a problem as it is stapled down. They are now suggesting they will clip the cable to the wall in some parts and try and bury it in a little groove at the very edge of the house in others.

Of course this revised plan leaves a couple of problems:

On the point the cable exits the house (see photo) the cable is so thick it will come away from the house and create a small loop. That loop will need to be boxed off.
On just after it exits the house, the cable crosses an external doorway. They are suggesting scooping out a little gulley just under the door to pass the cable along.
Once it passes the door the suggestion is that it will be clipped up (you can see a small overhang above the darker brickwork, and it could sit neatly under there. A few feet later the cable rounds a corner and again is so thick that it won't be flush to the wall and will leave a little loop sticking out.

So the contractor seems to be trying to figure out a plan to deal with this. It seems it might have been easier to go "up and over" the door and then clip it up around the eaves, but of course the electricians did not leave enough cable for that. They worked their asses off to hide the cable in the house to get it from the fuseboard to that exit point, no other exit point is really viable.

So the question is; what is an acceptable solution? My contract states the cable will be invisible in the house, but I'm OK with it being visible outside the house. However it seems that clipping it to the wall / running it along under the door is less than ideal considering the looping problems this causes. They're going to show up with an option or two today, and I want to be ready to push back if any options leave me unsafe, or in breach of building regs, or if they indeed decide to cut and extend the cable (is this even possible) to go up and over, will this compromise the power supply or make the connection less robust?

ALL help and comments appreciated. The work quality has been very good. This is a well-known reputable company I am dealing with.

Sorry about the terrible picture quality.

meercat · 19-07-2021 6:49am

Don’t do surface. It’ll look terrible and you’ll see it forever. Get the slabs lifted. Once one is up the rest should come up handy enough then re cement the joints.

jumbone · 19-07-2021 9:12am

If you don't want it 'looping' where it exits the house, you should take the feed back entry into a wiska box or similar and then gland the swa into the box

It doesn't have to be SWA in the house...