The guide
Moving Home Tech in London: Broadband, TVs and the Home Office in full
How early do I have to book the broadband switch?
Ten to fourteen working days is the realistic lead time on most London addresses, and it is measured from the order date rather than your completion date. Order at exchange, give the provider the exact new address including the flat number, and ask whether the line at the property is active or needs an engineer visit.
Flats in converted Victorian houses are the common London trap: the communal cabinet may be locked, the previous occupant's line may still be live in their name, and an engineer visit then slips a week. Ask the agent who holds the cabinet key before moving day, not after.
- Order at exchange, not on completion day
- Confirm whether the new address needs an engineer appointment
- Check the master socket location before the desk is placed
- Keep a 5G dongle or phone hotspot as a two-week fallback
What will a removals crew disconnect, and what won't they?
Crews will unplug, wrap and carry anything that is plug-and-socket: monitors, consoles, desktop towers, printers, speakers on stands. Two people will lift a large TV into a purpose-made screen box or a flat-screen crate rather than a blanket.
What crews do not do as standard is anything fixed or wired: bracket removal from a wall, hard-wired sound bars, ceiling speakers, aerial and satellite terminations, or network points chased into plaster. These are quick jobs but they are a different trade, so book them as separate visits rather than assuming the movers will improvise.
Packing screens, towers and drives so they survive the lorry
Screens travel upright, never flat, and never with anything stacked on them. A flat-screen crate or a double-walled screen box with corner protection is the only safe way a 55-inch panel crosses London on a Friday.
Desktop towers travel upright too, with any GPU support fitted or the card removed and boxed separately on older machines. Spinning drives and NAS units should be shut down properly rather than pulled at the wall, and any drive holding the only copy of something should be backed up before the van arrives — moving day is the wrong time to discover a single point of failure.
- Screen box or flat-screen crate for every TV and monitor over 32 inches
- Photograph the back of every device before unplugging
- Colour-code cables with tape and write the port name on the tape
- Back up NAS and desktop drives the week before, not the night before
The home office: getting Monday working on Saturday
If you work from home, the home office is a business continuity job wearing a moving-day hat. Nominate it as the first room unloaded and rebuilt, not the last, and tell the crew leader at the walk-through so the desk and chair come off the tail of the load.
Set the desk before the boxes arrive, run power and network first, then place the machines. A room with a working socket strip and a live router takes twenty minutes to become an office; a room with fourteen boxes in it takes an evening.
A day-one power-up order that avoids the classic mistakes
Bring things up in dependency order rather than the order they come out of the boxes. Power first, network second, then the machines that need the network, then everything decorative.
- Check the consumer unit and test the sockets you intend to use
- Plug in the router at the master socket and let it sync for 20 minutes
- Bring up the mesh nodes or extenders one at a time, nearest first
- Power the desktop and NAS, confirm they see the network before moving on
- Mount or stand the TV, then pair remotes and re-scan channels
- Re-pair smart bulbs, doorbells and speakers last — they need the network up
Smart-home kit, aerials and the things you leave behind
Smart bulbs, thermostats and video doorbells are usually fixtures in the eyes of the sale unless you agreed otherwise in the fixtures and fittings form. If you are taking them, replace them with the originals you kept in the loft and factory-reset each device before you leave — an unreset doorbell is still on your account and still filming someone else's front door.
Aerials, satellite dishes and Sky boxes rarely justify the move. The dish stays, the box is usually swapped by the provider, and the new address may need a completely different setup. Budget for a re-scan rather than a rescue.