How to Connect Electricity to Your Garden Building

Written by Garden Buildings Direct

Garden Buildings Direct

Installing electricity greatly increases the functionality of a garden building such as your shed. This guide will take you through what you need to know to add electricity to a garden building.

Installing electricity can also apply to these applications:

Adding wired lighting for interior or exterior light fixtures
Using a computer in your garden office
Running a washing machine and dryer in your laundry shed (also requires a water supply)
Using power tools in your garden workshop
Adding a refrigerator to your garden bar
Running electrical gym equipment such as a treadmill in your gym shed
Adding electrical entertainment to your family garden room.

The extension cable method

This is the simplest, but not necessarily the best, method of adding electricity to your outbuilding. It requires you to have a waterproof outdoor mains power socket on the outside of your house (unless you’re happy to run it through an open door or window). Simply run an extension cord of a sufficient length from this socket to your building.

On a wooden shed or a summer house, you can cut a hole for the cable to enter through a wall, mount the socket module on the interior wall if you wish, and fill the hole.

This provides you with mains sockets to use with your electrical devices, whether that’s a drill, a computer or your lawnmower.

Don’t want a cable running across your garden? You can bury it underneath the soil. If you have a patio or path in the way, this will have to be dug up and restored afterwards, so the work could require some expensive tools.

However, there are a few problems with the extension cable method you need to bear in mind:

The cable needs to be 100% watertight with no holes in the casing.
If you have the cable under the ground, you need to be careful about any future digging projects when you do your gardening. If an underground plant were ever to push the cable up, a lawnmower could cause damage.
If the cable were to stop working, you would have to repeat the work to replace it.
Extension cords have an amp limit. You need to ensure the cable and the wall socket can handle all the equipment you plan to use at the same time. Overloading this can damage the cable and wall socket, and potentially cause a fire hazard.
It only provides mains power, so you can only use items with a standard 3-pin plug. Built-in lighting with a wall switch normally uses a separate electricity supply.

Get an electrician to do it

A qualified electrician is the best solution for providing a proper electrical supply to your garden building, connected from your home’s fuse box. This means you can have not only wall sockets, but properly integrated ceiling lights with wall switches that don’t also have to take up a power socket.

An electrician will run more specialist cabling under the ground to your log cabin in such a way that will likely be safer than doing it yourself. The safety element is a crucial component for staying compliant with the Building Regulations. Hiring a qualified professional is not only for your own benefit, but it is a legal requirement.

Regulations for adding electricity to outbuildings

Providing an electrical supply to your garden building is subject to Part P of the Building Regulations. This covers electrical works for both the home and the garden.

The important parts of the regulations you need to know for garden purposes are:

You must inform the local authority about the works being undertaken – after all, future owners of the property will need to know about any cables running under the ground.
The electrician doing the work must be properly registered.
You are protected in case there are any issues with the work meeting the legal standards.

How much does it cost to add electricity to a shed?

Getting an electrician to install your garden electrics usually ranges from £500 to £2,000. Of course, this varies based on factors such as the distance from the main supply, the complexity of the installation, and any additional features or upgrades you want. They may charge an hourly or daily rate. This may seem expensive, but the alternative could be to have to invest in your own power tools to do the ground work.