7 min read
Most of the houses we work on are already lived in. Retrofitting is entirely normal, and the results can be excellent — but the trade-offs are different from a new build, and it is worth being clear about them before you start.
Three things to check before you call anyone
You can learn a surprising amount about your own house in twenty minutes, and it will make every conversation afterwards more useful.
Is the wiring in conduit? Look at an exposed run in a garage, store or roof space. A great deal of Kenyan construction runs cable through conduit rather than burying it directly in plaster. If yours does, and the conduit has any spare capacity, new cable can often be drawn through without opening a single wall. This one detail separates a straightforward retrofit from a disruptive one more than anything else.
How much room is there at the consumer unit? Open the cover and look for spare ways, and for space around the board. Control equipment has to live somewhere near the incoming supply, and a board crammed into a shallow recess with no space beside it limits the options considerably.
Can you get above the ceiling? A roof space you can crawl through, or a suspended ceiling that lifts, is a route for cable that costs almost nothing to use. A solid concrete slab with no void is a very different proposition.
Photograph all three. An integrator who can see them before visiting will give you a far more honest answer on the phone.
What retrofits well
Security. Usually the easiest win. The Comfort system was designed to retrofit: sensors are compact, many can be wireless, and the panel does not need to sit anywhere prominent. Five arming modes, automatic arming, alerts and a six-month event log, without touching the decoration.
It is also the subsystem where retrofit costs least relative to the benefit. Nothing about a door contact or a motion sensor demands that cable run back through the middle of the house.
Cameras. Straightforward, provided you can get power and data to the camera positions — usually along an eave or through a soffit rather than through the middle of the house. External runs in conduit along the fascia are normal practice and, done tidily, are barely visible from the ground.
The awkward camera positions are the ones that want to look back at the house from a distance: a gate post or a boundary corner with no power nearby. Those need a trench, and a trench is the one part of a camera retrofit that costs real money.
Access control. Gates, garage doors and pedestrian gates sit outside the finished fabric of the house, so motorising them and bringing them onto the app rarely involves any internal work at all. If your compound already has a gate motor, adding it to the system is frequently just a matter of wiring into its existing control board.
Curtains and blinds. Practical wherever you can reach the track with power. In many houses there is already a socket close enough, or one can be added along a short surface run that a pelmet or curtain box then hides completely.
What is more awkward
Whole-house lighting control. This is the honest one. Full lighting control wants every circuit run back to a central point, and in a finished house that means chasing walls and ceilings.
There are three sensible ways round it, in rough order of cost and capability.
Retrofit modules sit in the ceiling rose or behind the existing switch plate and take control of that circuit where it already is. No new cable, no redecorating. You keep your existing switches, which continue to work normally, and the system gains control of the same circuit. This is the workhorse of most retrofits.
Wireless protocols avoid new cable altogether, using battery or mains-powered devices that talk to a hub. Excellent for adding a switch position where none exists — a second switch by the bed, say, which would otherwise mean lifting a floor.
Partial centralisation takes the rooms you are already renovating and does them properly, centralised, while leaving the rest on retrofit modules. Because it is all one platform, the house does not feel like two systems.
None of the three is quite as flexible as a fully centralised installation. All three are a very long way ahead of a normal switch, and none requires redecorating.
Whole-house audio and video distribution. Distributing sources to every room needs cable to every room. Where that is not practical, per-room streaming devices controlled from the same interface get you most of the experience for a fraction of the disruption. The compromise is real but small: you lose the ability to send one source to every room simultaneously, which most households discover they rarely wanted.
What is usually not worth it
Chasing a finished, decorated house top to bottom purely to centralise lighting that already works acceptably. If you are not otherwise renovating, the disruption and making-good rarely justify the marginal gain over retrofit modules.
The exception is when you are already renovating a room. If the plaster is coming off anyway, do the cabling while it is off. Always. The cable is the cheap part; the wall being open is the expensive part, and you are paying for that regardless.
Two questions specific to building here
What happens when the power goes off? Any system worth installing should fail safe and recover on its own. Controllers and alarm panels sit on their own backup so that a cut does not disarm the house or lose the event log. Lighting returns to normal switch behaviour rather than leaving a room you cannot turn on.
If you already have an inverter or solar, that changes the conversation usefully — it is often possible to put the control equipment on the backed-up side of the changeover so the system rides through outages entirely. Worth raising early, because it affects where equipment is best positioned.
What happens when the internet goes off? This is the question people forget to ask. A well-designed system keeps working locally: switches, keypads, scenes, schedules and alarm functions should not depend on a connection to anywhere. What you lose is remote access from outside the house, and notifications, until it returns.
Be wary of any system where the answer is different from that. A house that stops responding to its own light switches because a line is down is not automation.
Sequence it around what you are already doing
The best retrofits are staged, and the order matters more than the pace.
Start with security and cameras. They are self-contained, need the least disruption, and deliver the most immediate day-one value. They also give you a working system to judge before committing further.
Add access control next if you have a gate — again, almost entirely external work.
Then take lighting room by room, as you redecorate. Not as a project of its own. Every room that comes up for painting is a room where cabling is nearly free.
Leave distribution-heavy work until a major renovation, if ever.
Because everything runs on the same platform, a system added in phases ends up in the same place as one installed all at once. It just takes a longer road to get there, and it spreads the cost across years instead of months.
What to ask any installer
Four questions that quickly separate a serious quote from a shopping list:
- What happens to this system if you disappear? Proprietary platforms that only one company can program are a genuine risk. Ask who else can support it.
- Will my existing switches still work? With retrofit modules the answer should be yes. If it is no, ask why.
- What is on backup, and for how long? Specifically the controller, the alarm panel and the network equipment.
- Is the programming included, and how many revisions? Scenes almost never survive first contact with a household unchanged. A system nobody will come back and adjust is one you will stop using.
What we do first
We walk the property, look at the consumer unit and the existing wiring, and tell you plainly which of the above applies to your house. Some homes turn out to have far more usable cabling than the owner expected. Others do not, and it is better to know that before anyone has been paid.
We would rather tell you a room is not worth doing than sell you the disruption of doing it.
Book a walkthrough and we will give you a straight assessment.