ESB wants us to move neighbour’s electricity connection?

houseyhouse

We’re extending our semi-d. In our estate, electricity comes into one house and then is passed overground to the house next door (not the house connected to us but the house whose side passage runs beside our side passage - God knows why it was done this way but they’re all like this in the estate). The side passage is very wide and we’re are doing a side extension and moving the electric meter to the new side wall. The ESB have decided they now want to upgrade things and connect our neighbour below ground instead of above ground as before and that we should pay for this including putting the cables under a wall and fixing our neighbour’s path etc. This will cost around €700. This seems totally unreasonable to us. Is this normal?

Rows Grower

Sounds a bit mad but maybe it's a safety issue. You should contact them and get more details.

There's no advantage to your neighbour either way, they will have their electricy supply same as before.

Tippbhoy1

Does that include the move of the meter that you’re requesting? Standard call-out fee for anything like that is around €400 plus Vat I think. What they want to do otherwise is hardly any of your concern.

houseyhouse

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122369003#Comment_122369003

No, this is an extra €600 plus VAT above the fee to move our own electric box.

They’ve been awful to us so far. Huge delay getting them to move the box. Problems about the location of the new box, insisting it goes on the front of the house not the side because of ‘access’ even though another house on the road just got extended and moved it into a much narrower side passage (ours is 1m). Then they refused to put it near the front door because of ‘safety’ even though another house nearby is being built with one much closer to an external door. The other recently extended house also didn’t have to move their neighbour’s connection underground.

houseyhouse

To clarify, I got more information and it’s the builder we need to pay to do the additional work to do with digging under the party wall, fixing the neighbour’s footpath etc. It’s not an additional fee to the ESB themselves.

Mellor

You are moving the connection. You'll need to comply with current regs for where a meter box can be mounted.

As you are also disconnecting power to the neighbour, you will need to reconnect them in the most appropriate way. If the extension is single story. Running a cable from the new single story eaves to the rear house is not great.