How many Downlights can an electrician install in a day?

[Mworks89]

There is a contrbuting factor here, some people north of UK charge less then London,you could go on check a trade see what they say on the Webb page.
Me if the spark has not given you the correct price to which you want you should have got a few qoutes.

I did. One said testing for the electrical testing work in the extension would cost £300 fixed price. And I was completely happy with that. Another said similar. To install the 8 downlights only they quoted £200, which again I was completely happy with. They said the installation of downlights will not take more than 2 hours as all the testing and wiring would have been done by then. They said the testing will take them the longest. And to complete this whole job they said a day and a half.

But the person I went with said daily rate of £300. So I thought as previous electricians have said it would take them a day and a half to do this job then this was a good deal. As it would have cost me £450.

But this electrician spent literally 2 hours on their phone talking to another client. He should have done that in his own time. In total it cost me £750 with him. Apologies I didn’t mention in my previous post that he took a day to test the electrical area before any works (which is fair) and then another day (where he was speaking to other clients and on his phone) to test the electrics after installation.

 

[nicebutdim]

It can be difficult enough to fit downlights which you wired yourself, once builders have moved well clipped wiring when it comes to boarding a ceiling. Then they builders might decide to trap one or those cables between plasterboard and joist.

Fitting out down lights wired by someone else has the added complication of not knowing where wiring is and not knowing if it will work with customer's planned location of each downlight.

Unless the downlights had already been cut out in correct locations, with wiring pulled through (and no wiring issues found), I wouldn't consider 30 min per light to be unreasonable - in fact it could be very fast work.

 

[goasis]

If you have a plan for the downlights, and all you are doing is cutting out and fitting them then yes, 8 downlights in 4 hrs is slow.
Fixed price work versus day rate, you take your pick and deal with whatever the cost ends up as.
I had the opposite recently when I took down 3 ceiling lights and fitted 12 downlights in a finished ceiling (obviously a few holes cut and patched.) On a fixed price. Went smoothly, all installed and tested in 5 hrs (not including certs and paperwork) so to the customer it probably looked like a big bill for "not alot of work", but at least they knew upfront what the cost was, regardless of time taken.