Switchboard and mains upgrades in Melbourne's south east.

Most switchboard problems start with a house asking more of its wiring than it was designed for. Ducted gas gets swapped for split systems, a gas cooktop becomes induction, a car starts charging in the garage. Each change adds load to a board that was often installed decades ago.

We start with a load calculation for the finished house, so the upgrade is sized once and properly. Every circuit gets its own RCBO, which means a fault on one circuit only switches off that circuit instead of half the house, and everything is labelled so you, or the next electrician, can tell what's what at a glance.

Where the incoming supply is the bottleneck, we upgrade the consumer mains and coordinate the service fuse work with the distributor. We'll tell you how long the power will be off before the day, and leave spare space in the board for solar, a battery or an EV charger later.

Ceramic, or rewireable, fuses were standard in Melbourne homes for decades. When a fault happens, a thin wire inside the fuse melts and cuts the power. They did the job for their time, but they don't protect people the way a modern board does.

A ceramic fuse only reacts to overload. It does nothing for electric shock, which is what a safety switch (RCD) is for. Fuse wire is also easy to replace with the wrong rating, so a fuse can end up letting far more current through than the cable can carry. And most fuse boards have no room for the circuits a modern house needs.

Replacing a ceramic fuse board means a new enclosure, a main switch, and an RCBO on every circuit. Each circuit then has its own overload and shock protection, and a fault on one circuit doesn't take out the rest of the house. Older boards are sometimes mounted on panels that contain asbestos, so we check for that and handle it properly as part of the job.