Switchboard Upgrades in Footscray

Switchboards in Footscray

The older parts of Footscray are Victorian and Edwardian cottages, much like Yarraville and Seddon. Around them sits a large stock of post-war housing, a great deal of which has been rental property for decades, and then a newer layer of apartments and townhouses through the centre and along the river. Which of those three you're in largely determines what we find.

Footscray also has a much higher proportion of rented and investor-owned housing than the suburbs around it, and that changes the picture. Owner-occupied homes tend to get upgraded when something is added. Rented homes tend to get upgraded when a regulation or an incident forces it, which means the boards we open in rental stock are frequently the oldest and the most heavily patched.

What we usually find in Footscray boards

In the older rented cottages we routinely find boards untouched since the 1970s: ceramic rewireable fuses, an asbestos backing panel, no RCD protection anywhere, and a couple of later additions bolted in wherever they'd fit. We also see more unauthorised DIY work in Footscray than in most suburbs — circuits added without a Certificate of Electrical Safety, which is illegal in Victoria and tends to surface at the worst possible moment.

At the other end, the apartments and newer townhouses usually have perfectly adequate boards, and the work there is different: individual unit boards inside a common-property meter room, which means the owners corporation has to be involved before anyone touches anything. Those jobs are less about the switchgear and more about coordination and access.

What the upgrade actually involves

The old board comes out and a modern enclosure goes in, with a circuit breaker and an RCD protecting every circuit, and every one of them labelled so the next person can read it. In older properties the consumer mains and the main earth often have to be replaced at the same time, because the incoming cable was sized for a house with a stove, a fridge and a few lights. If the backing board is asbestos it has to be removed and disposed of properly, which is a licensed job in its own right and not something to cut corners on. Most domestic upgrades are a single day on site. Your power will be off for a decent part of it, so we agree a day that suits you and we tell you honestly what time we expect to be back on — including if the distributor has to attend to pull the service fuse.

What usually triggers it in Footscray

Rental compliance is the big one in Footscray. Victoria's rental minimum standards require RCD protection on rented properties, and a lot of the older housing here simply doesn't have it. If you're a landlord or an agent with a board full of ceramic fuses and no safety switches, that's the fix — and it's usually a board upgrade rather than a bolt-on, because there's nowhere to put the RCDs.

The rest of the work here is the usual mix: renovations adding load, boards with no space left, and faults that the old board can't diagnose. Footscray's Victorian cottages have exactly the same wiring problems as Yarraville's, and where the circuits are original the board is often only half the job — see house rewiring in Footscray.

Working in Footscray

We cover all of Footscray 3011 and work here regularly. Practically, the suburb splits in two: the older houses are straightforward jobs with the meter box on an external wall or a side path, while the apartments and townhouses need owners corporation approval and access to a common meter room, which we'll organise but which does add lead time. For rental properties we can deal directly with the agent and coordinate tenant access, which is usually the slowest part.