Plumbers & electricians in Kemsing and Borough Green

The escarpment runs straight across the district. Kemsing sits on the scarp face below it, an old village on the Pilgrims' Way with a Saxon church and the well named after Saint Edith, and Wrotham lies under Wrotham Hill further east, where the M20 and the M26 meet. South of the chalk the land rises again to the Greensand ridge: Seal on the road out of Sevenoaks, Ightham with the fourteenth-century moated manor at Ightham Mote, and Plaxtol and Underriver down quieter lanes among woods. Borough Green is the odd one out. It was a hamlet of Wrotham parish until the railway opened a station there in eighteen seventy-four, and it grew into a village of its own around the line, with sand dug from pits north of the station.

Up on the chalk the pattern changes again. West Kingsdown was a scattered farming place until commuters began settling there between the wars, and it grew to nearly five thousand people by nineteen eighty-one, much of it along wooded roads and cul-de-sacs added one at a time. Chalet bungalows are a very common house there, many of them extended upward since.

A chalet bungalow keeps its bathroom under the slope of the roof.

Bathroom zones after a refit

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Electrics in a room with a bath or shower are governed by Section 701 of BS 7671, and the whole of it is built on zones measured out from the water. Zone 0 is the inside of the bath or the shower tray, and anything electrical in there has to be low voltage, twelve volts SELV, and rated to be immersed. Zone 1 is the space straight above the bath or tray, up to 2.25 m from the floor or to the highest fixed shower head if that is higher, and with no tray at all it reaches out 1.2 m from the outlet. Zone 2 is the band 0.6 m wide beyond zone 1. Fixed equipment in zones 1 and 2 must be at least IPX4, which is why the light over a bath is a sealed fitting. A wall switch belongs outside the zones, while the cord of a pull switch may hang inside them. A 13 amp socket must be at least 3 m horizontally from the edge of zone 1, and the only socket allowed nearer is a proper shaver supply unit, kept out of direct spray. Every circuit in the room, lights and towel rail included, needs 30 mA RCD protection. A sloping ceiling can limit the zones, so in a chalet bungalow or a loft en-suite the geometry is rarely the textbook picture, and it has to be measured in the room itself.

The zones follow the bath. Move the bath and a switch that was legal on Friday can sit in zone 2 on Monday.

That is the catch with a refit, and with an en-suite added under the eaves or in a converted loft. The plumbing drawing gets done first, the tray goes where the waste will fall, and the existing light, the fan and the switch are left where they were because nobody measured again. What you notice is usually nothing at all, until an electrician tests the room or a fitting starts to fail from damp. An extractor fan may sit in zone 1 or 2 if it is rated for it, but its isolator stays outside the zones. A towel rail or the controller for an underfloor heating mat is fed from a fused spur outside the zones, often on the landing side of the wall. Whether the room’s circuits already carry RCD protection depends on the board in that particular house, so it is checked before anything is connected. Doing the plumbing and the electrics of a bathroom together means the zones are drawn before the first pipe goes in, not discovered afterwards.