Browse Forums Lighting + Lighting Design Re: Downlights - Builder or organise ourselves. 2May 11, 2008 7:25 pm If you are building a single storey, the downlights can be done after hand over. If you are building a double storey home, it is highly advisable to get the builder to provide wiring for downlights in the ground floor and install downlights after hand over by your own electrician. This will work out a lot cheaper. The reason being, it is hard to get to the roof of the ground floor at a later stage.
With our home, we are getting the builder do all the lighting and electrial requirement in the ground floor including all future downlight points fitted with only baton holder. After handover, we have plans to install downlights at these baton points wherever required. Re: Downlights - Builder or organise ourselves. 4May 11, 2008 11:51 pm My builder quoted us $102 per downlight. We are going to do them ourselves after handover.
You should be paying around $25-$30 for the wiring and installation + the cost of the downlight ($5-$20). what we did was we put the 1 included light fitting (batton light) in the position of a future downlight.... Kind tried to show it below. The x is where i want the downlights, the H is where they would normally put a batton light and the 0 is where i got them to put the batten light instead. This means that when I do the downlights later that I won't have a hole in the middle of the room. You also have to make sure that the batton lights ARE NOT fixed to noggins. -------- x x x - H---- x x 0 -------- Re: Downlights - Builder or organise ourselves. 5May 12, 2008 1:04 pm if you get it done by your builder you normally pay about 25% extra (for our builder in Sydney) on top of what the electrician charge...
If you get your own electrician, and also include a lot other work for him (say external lights, garden lights, combined heater/fan/lights in bathroom, ...etc) you normally should be able to negotiate a better deal. The pain is you have to wait until handover... reply 6May 13, 2008 12:25 am i say do it yourself.. call a private electrician afterwards and you'll save maybe half price..
eg builder [u]$96 per downlight[/u] private $27 per install, we buy $12 per light, so [u]$39 per downlight[/u] big difference, consider it. Re: Downlights - Builder or organise ourselves. 7May 13, 2008 9:28 am Having said that, keep in mind everything you get your builder to do will cost you more than getting your own guy to do it. Carpet, tiles, lighting, feature walls, water tanks, driveway... the list of what you could "do later for less" is pretty long.
So it really comes down to whether you'd rather pay more to have it done now, or what until after hand-over and possibly delay moving in. Our downlights were included as standard, so fortunately we didn't have to think about it Alan and Thuy in Melbourne Building a second time! Hi Mofflepop, I would recommend finding a building designer to prepare plans, they should design to your specified budget. The benefit is you can tender the project out… 9 20162 Anthony Firstly, wow you have put a lot of work into your list of questions! Great job and they are mostly valid questions that a builder should be able to answer. As… 14 10673 |