A full rewire is one of those jobs where the finished result is invisible and the disruption is total. Every room is affected, floors come up, walls get chased and nothing is where it was. Rewiring waste is not really about cable at all, which surprises people, and there are two items in it that must never go in a container. Our Bamber Bridge skip hire service handles a steady run of these.
The making good is the load
Cable itself is compact. A whole house of stripped out wiring coils into a corner of a container and weighs very little, and in any case it should not be going in there at all.
What fills the skip is everything the electrician had to disturb to get at the cable. Plaster chased off walls for new drops, sometimes in every room. Floorboards lifted and split, particularly in older properties where the boards have been up before and are past reusing. Ceilings opened up to run cable between floors. Old boxing in, skirtings taken off and not worth refitting, and any tiling that came off around new socket positions.
On top of that comes the making good itself, which produces plasterboard offcuts and bagged plaster waste. Gypsum has to be kept out of the general load, which our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains.
So the container is sized for building waste rather than for electrical waste, which is not what most people expect when they book one for a rewire.
The copper is worth separating
Old cable is copper inside a sheath, and copper has a strong scrap value. A whole house rewire produces a worthwhile quantity of it.
Most electricians take the old cable away themselves for exactly this reason, and that is usually part of the arrangement rather than a favour. Check the quotation, because there is no sense paying to dispose of something with a value and no sense assuming somebody else is dealing with it.
Old consumer units, metal back boxes and any steel conduit go the same way. The metal is worth keeping together whoever ends up with it.
The two things that must not go in a container
Fluorescent tubes are the first. The strip lights that come out of a kitchen, a garage or a utility room contain a small amount of mercury, and breaking them releases it. They need to go intact to a household waste site or collection point that takes them, and a skip is the one place guaranteed to break them.
The second is easily missed. Older mains powered smoke alarms of the ionisation type contain a very small radioactive source, and they should not go into general waste. Some manufacturers will take them back, and household waste sites will usually accept them. It is a small thing and it is worth doing properly.
Beyond those, everything electrical coming out belongs in the electrical stream rather than the container. Old light fittings, extractor fans, immersion heaters, thermostats and anything with a battery in it. Our guide to how to dispose of electrical waste responsibly covers where it all goes.
Very old wiring needs care
If the house has never been rewired, what comes out may be a good deal older than expected. Rubber insulated cable perishes with age and crumbles when handled, and in properties of real age the sheathing on some old cable is lead.
None of that is a reason for alarm, and it is a reason not to pull old cable through joists with bare hands or to leave fragments lying about. Take it out carefully, keep it contained, and let the electrician deal with it as the metal it is.
The other thing a rewire uncovers is what is behind the walls and under the floors. In properties of a certain period, old lagging around pipework and materials in ceiling voids warrant a look before they are disturbed, and our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip explains what needs a licensed contractor.
Sizing and timing
For a whole house rewire with making good, an 8 tonne builders skip is the usual choice. Where the work is partial, a 4 tonne midi skip will normally do.
The timing point is that a rewire has two distinct waste peaks. The first is the strip out and chasing, which is dusty and heavy. The second is the plastering and making good a week or two later. One container standing through the gap between them is a container doing nothing, and two shorter hires often work out better. Tell us the programme and we will fit around it.
Living in it
Most rewires happen with people still in the house, which makes the container position matter more than usual. Keep the front approach clear, get it as close to the door as you can, and expect a great deal of traffic in and out.
Where the skip has to go on the road, Lancashire County Council acts as highway authority at £36 per month, covered in our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire.
We work across this area daily, running Leyland skip hire jobs alongside Bamber Bridge and across the surrounding villages, and everything comes back to our own recycling centre for sorting. Our environmental and recycling page explains how.
Ring us on 01772 364399 with the size of the property and whether the electrician is taking the cable. Our contact page is there if you would rather write.
