Step by step
How to budget electrical work in a renovation
Electrical is the line most renovation budgets carry as one round number somebody guessed. It does not have to be. Put the sockets, switches and lights on the plan and each one prices its own cable, its own back box and its own share of an electrician’s day — then you decide whether to pay by the hour or by the quote.
Free to use. Every price and rate is yours to change. What the project manager does →
Try it on one room
This runs the same calculation the planner runs when you place a point. Count what the room needs, give it a perimeter and the distance back to the board, and change the rate to your electrician’s.
One room, priced
The run back to the board is the one length nobody can guess for you. In the planner you place the board on the drawing and it is measured instead.
18
Points
2
Circuits
74.4 lm
Cable
18
Back boxes
Materials at typical merchant prices, hours from the same allowance the planner uses. Both are planning figures, not a quote — and the work itself is for a qualified electrician wherever your rules say so.
The whole way through
- 1
Draw the rooms first
Electrical quantities come out of the geometry, so the plan has to exist before the points do.
- ·The perimeter is the run the cable distributes along. The ceiling height is the drop to each wall point.
- ·A room you have drawn needs no measurements typed twice — the points read them.
- ·Rooms that are only sketched still work; you can place points before you have chosen a single finish.
- 2
Open Electrical and place the points
Pick a symbol from the palette, then click the plan. Wall points snap to the nearest wall; ceiling points land where you click.
- ·Sixteen kinds: single and double sockets, outdoor sockets, appliance connections, data and TV outlets, switches, two-way switches, dimmers, thermostats, ceiling and wall light points, downlights, ceiling outlets and smoke alarms.
- ·A measurement appears while you place: along a wall it is the distance back to the corner or to the next point, in a ceiling it is the distance to all four walls.
- ·Drag a point afterwards to move it. A wall point slides along its wall and round the corner; a ceiling point dropped in another room becomes that room’s cost.
- ·Set the height on any point — 300 for a socket, 1100 for a switch, 1400 for a thermostat are the defaults, not rules.
- 3
Put the consumer unit on the drawing
Place the board and the home run stops being a guess.
- ·Every circuit is routed from the room back to the board, around the building rather than straight through it, and up the full storey height when the board is on another floor.
- ·Without a board the calculation falls back to a typed assumption, which is the one number on the list nobody chose.
- ·Group points into named circuits and the circuit count comes from your drawing instead of from a rule of thumb.
- 4
Add underfloor heating where you want it
Heating cable is a floor trade, not a point. Tick it on the floor and give it the heated area.
- ·Three products: cable, mats and foil. Cable and mats cannot be cut, so the calculation picks the nearest stock size at or above what the area needs and tells you the spacing that comes out of it.
- ·Heated area is yours to choose — you do not run cable under a fitted kitchen or a bath.
- ·The thermostat, the floor sensor and the hours are included; the heating cable itself is electrician’s work and its hours land on that trade.
- 5
Read what it costs, and what it will take
The materials list carries an Electrical group with the cable, boxes, fittings and breakers, plus the hours the work is expected to take.
- ·Materials and hours are deliberately two figures. Putting them in one number is how an estimate becomes an argument.
- ·The group is on the list whether or not symbols are switched on for the PDF — a total you cannot check against its own lines is worse than no total.
- 6
Link the plan to a project
The drawing knows what the room costs. A project is where that figure meets a budget, a trade rate and what you have actually spent — and the link is one click.
- ·In the planner, the project chip at the top of the screen links the whole plan. Every room you have drawn gets a project room of the same name, and rooms you draw later are linked as you close them.
- ·The project then carries an Electrical row for each room — the cable, boxes and fittings with their quantities, and what they come to — beside the floor, wall and ceiling rows from the same drawing.
- ·The electrician’s time crosses as hours, on the electrician’s own trade. That is what the rate card in the next step prices; until a rate is set those hours are counted as nothing, and the card says so in words.
- ·Nothing is copied. Move a socket or add a downlight and the project total follows, because the project holds a link to the drawing rather than a snapshot of it.
- ·The free plan covers one project, and everything stays on your own device until you have an account.
- 7
Set the rate the hours are priced at
In a project’s Budget tab, give each trade its own hourly rate.
- ·An electrician, a painter and your own weekends are three different prices; one project rate would cost all of them the same.
- ·Hours with no rate are counted as nothing, so the rate card says in words which trades are currently being treated as free.
- ·Clearing a rate removes it rather than storing a zero — "not set" and "costs nothing" must not print the same.
- 8
Or put the quote in instead
Contracted work takes a fixed price, hours, or both — they add up.
- ·Give a line to one room and it lands in that room’s budget; leave the room off and it is a cost for the whole job.
- ·Mark it as an estimate, quoted or accepted. That changes no arithmetic at all; it is there so a guess and a signed quote are not the same row in a list you are deciding from.
- ·A fixed price and your drawn estimate can live side by side, which is the point: you can see what you were quoted against what the job looks like it should cost.
- 9
Hand it over
Export the plan document with the electrical layer switched on.
- ·Each floor plan page carries the symbols, drawn as coded circles that survive a photocopy at 1:100.
- ·A schedule sheet follows: the legend for every code used, the points room by room with heights and circuits, the circuit list, and what the materials come to.
- ·Hours are stated separately on the sheet, so the person reading it can price their own labour.
Three ways to carry the cost
| Drawn and costed | Points on the plan price their own materials, and their hours are costed at the trade rate you set. | You are planning the job yourself and want to know what it should come to. |
| Fixed price | A contracted-work line with an agreed price, in one room or across the whole job. | You have a quote and want the budget to hold it. |
| Both at once | The drawn estimate and the quote side by side, each visible in the breakdown. | You want to see what you were quoted against what the work looks like it should cost. |
Hourly and fixed are not alternatives in the arithmetic — a contracted line can carry both, and they sum. That is how the extra day on top of an agreed scope gets paid for.
What the free plan covers
Drawing, placing points and reading the costs is free and stays on your own device. The lines worth knowing before you start:
- ·Free: one project, three saved calculations, two closed rooms in the planner, no cloud sync and no photos.
- ·Print and PNG export work on the free plan and carry a watermark.
- ·The plan document — floor plans, materials and the electrical schedule sheet — needs a paid plan, and only Pro gets it unwatermarked.
- ·An account exists only on a paid plan; without one everything is local, which is also why nothing leaves your machine.
What the work involves
The planner counts the materials. These explain what is behind the walls and under the floor.
Common questions
What does the cable figure actually include?
Four terms, each measurable rather than assumed: the home run from the board to the room for every circuit, the distribution along the room, the drop from the chase down to each wall point and up to each ceiling point, and a tail left at every box for terminating. A slack percentage is applied to the lot. It is an estimate for buying and budgeting, not a cable schedule.
How are the hours worked out?
An allowance per point for rough-in and terminating, an allowance per circuit made off at the board, and a fixed call-out for connecting, testing and documenting. They are planning allowances, not a price list, and they are reported separately from materials so you can price them at your own rate or replace them with a quote.
Can I use this instead of an electrician?
No. It is for budgeting and for telling an electrician what you want. In most countries the installation work itself must be done or certified by a qualified person, and nothing here is a design, a certificate or a compliance check. Use it to plan and to compare quotes.
Do the points cost anything before I switch on the PDF layer?
Yes. The layer switches control whether symbols are drawn, never whether the work is counted. A placed point is in the room total, the project estimate and the materials list from the moment you place it.
My project total does not include the electrical work. Why not?
The plan is almost certainly not linked to the project. Points are counted in the planner from the moment you place them, but they only reach a project budget through that link — the project chip at the top of the planner, or the plan picker on the project’s own page. Link it and the rows appear for every room at once, including the ones you drew before linking.
What happens if I drag a point into another room?
It becomes that room’s cost. A point pays for the room it sits in, so a downlight dragged from the hallway into the kitchen moves its materials and its hours with it — and it keeps its identity, so the whole drag is still a single undo.
Can I budget electrical work without drawing anything?
Yes — add a contracted-work line for the whole project with the quoted price. You lose the materials breakdown and the schedule sheet, but the figure is in the budget and in the totals. Many jobs start that way and get drawn later.
Does underfloor heating go in the electrical figure?
Its materials sit with the floor, because that is where you decided to put them, and its hours go to the electrician along with everything else. That way the floor shows what the floor costs and the electrician’s time is in one place.
Free to try — no sign-up, nothing to install. The whole job, in seven steps →