Choosing a commercial electrician is a different exercise from choosing one for your house. The stakes are different, the compliance obligations are different, and the cost of getting it wrong isn’t an inconvenience — it’s downtime, staff standing around, and in a bad case, liability.
This guide covers what commercial electrical work actually involves in Melbourne, what your obligations are, and how to tell a contractor who’ll be there in three years from one who won’t.
What a commercial electrician actually does
The trade is the same. The context isn’t.
Commercial electrical work covers three-phase distribution, larger switchboards and sub-boards, structured data cabling, emergency and exit lighting, commercial lighting design and maintenance, power for plant and machinery, testing and tagging, and thermal imaging of boards.
It also involves working around a business that has to keep operating. A lot of what we do in commercial settings happens after hours or in tightly-scheduled windows, because the alternative is closing the doors.
Where the loads get heavier still — manufacturing, warehousing, plant rooms — you’re into industrial electrical work, which brings its own standards and its own switchgear.
Your obligations as an owner or occupier
This is the part that catches people out.
You have a duty of care to anyone in the building — staff, contractors, customers. Under Victorian OH&S law, “I didn’t know” is not a defence.
Electrical installations must comply with AS/NZS 3000, and any work done must be by a licensed electrician who provides a Certificate of Electrical Safety. Keep those certificates. You will need them.
Emergency and exit lighting requires six-monthly testing under AS 2293, with a logbook. This is the single most commonly neglected obligation we see, and it’s the one that shows up first in a fire audit.
Test and tag intervals vary by environment — a construction site is three months, an office is five years. Getting the interval wrong is as much a problem as not doing it.
Your insurance may depend on all of it. Read the policy. Most commercial policies have conditions around electrical maintenance that quietly become relevant the day you claim.
What goes wrong, and what it costs
The failures we’re called to in commercial buildings are almost never surprises in hindsight.
Overloaded boards. A tenancy fitted out for an office in 2005 now runs a commercial kitchen, or the server room grew, or twelve extra workstations went in. The board was sized for the old load.
Ageing switchgear. Breakers have a service life. So do RCDs — and an RCD that doesn’t trip is worse than no RCD, because everyone assumes they’re protected.
Neglected emergency lighting. Batteries die quietly. You find out during an evacuation or an audit.
Undersized or unmanaged data cabling. Nobody plans the comms room, and five years later it’s a bird’s nest that nobody can trace.
No thermal imaging. A loose connection in a board heats up long before it fails. A scan finds it in twenty minutes. A failure finds it at 3am.
The cost of any of these isn’t the repair. It’s the trading hours you lose while it’s being repaired.
Choosing a commercial electrician
A few things worth checking that most people don’t.
Registered Electrical Contractor number. Ask for it. Ours is REC 25989. It’s a licence, not a marketing claim, and it’s verifiable.
Master Electricians membership. Not compulsory, but it means an independent body has looked at how the business operates.
Public liability cover, and the actual certificate. Ask what the limit is. Many commercial leases specify a minimum.
Who actually turns up. Plenty of larger firms subcontract. That’s not automatically bad, but you should know whether the person quoting is the person doing the work — and whether the standard survives the handover.
What happens afterwards. Will they answer the phone in two years when something they installed plays up? Our answer is a lifetime workmanship warranty, which is easy to say and expensive to mean.
Response times for faults. Ask specifically. “We’re pretty good” isn’t an answer. If you’re mid-trade and the power’s gone, you need to know whether help is 40 minutes away or tomorrow.
Maintenance beats repair, every time
The businesses that have the fewest electrical problems are the ones running a schedule rather than waiting for failures.
A workable commercial maintenance programme looks like: six-monthly emergency and exit lighting testing with a logbook, annual switchboard inspection and thermal scan, RCD testing on schedule, test and tag at the correct interval for the environment, and lighting audits to catch failing fittings before they’re all failing at once.
None of it is expensive relative to one unplanned shutdown.
Fit-outs and lease work
If you’re taking on a commercial space, get the electrical inspected before you sign — not after. We’ve walked through plenty of tenancies where the lights all work and the switchboard is thirty years past its useful life. What looks like a tidy space can carry six figures of remediation that becomes your problem the moment you’re the tenant.
Things worth checking: board capacity against your actual intended load, whether there’s three-phase available, the state of the emergency lighting and its logbook, data cabling condition and capacity, and whether previous fit-outs left undocumented modifications behind the walls.
Why Luno
We run commercial and industrial work the same way we run residential, which is the point. You get told what’s happening before it happens, you get the same standard from quote to handover, and you get someone who’ll clean up before they leave.
Over 200 five-star Google reviews. Registered Master Electrician. Lifetime workmanship warranty. And when something goes wrong outside hours, we answer — see emergency electrical.
We work with offices, hospitality venues, retail, warehouses, architects and designers across Melbourne’s east — Hawthorn, Camberwell, Richmond, Kew and surrounds.
If you’ve got a fit-out coming up, a board that’s near capacity, or a maintenance schedule that’s slipped, get in touch.
Further reading: Commercial Electricians Near Me · Switchboard Upgrades & Repair
