I do a lot of electrical safety checks. Most of them are on homes that look completely fine — nice houses, well kept, nothing obviously wrong.
That’s rather the point. Almost nothing that matters is visible from the living room.
Here’s what I actually find, in roughly the order I find it.
— Andrew Vaiano, Registered Master Electrician (REC 25989)
Smoke alarms past their date
This is the most common thing I find, and it’s the easiest to fix.
Photoelectric smoke alarms have a ten-year service life. Not the battery — the unit. The sensing element degrades, and after a decade the alarm is measurably slower to detect smoke. It’ll still test fine when you press the button, because the test button tests the horn and the battery, not the sensor.
Check the date stamped on the back of yours. If it starts with a 1 or a 201-something more than ten years ago, replace it.
The other thing I find is single, unconnected alarms — one in the hallway, one at the top of the stairs, neither talking to the other. If a fire starts in the garage at 2am, an alarm in the garage doesn’t wake anyone in the bedrooms.
What we install now is interconnected, mains-powered photoelectric alarms with battery backup. One triggers, they all trigger. In a two-storey home, or any home where bedrooms are away from the living areas, this is the difference that matters. See smoke alarm installation.
Rental properties in Victoria have specific obligations here, and they’ve tightened. If you’re a landlord and you haven’t checked, check.
No safety switches
The second most common, and the more serious of the two.
I open a switchboard and find circuit breakers — sometimes brand new ones — and no RCDs. The owner reasonably assumes they’re protected. They’re not, not in the way they think.
Circuit breakers protect the wiring. They stop the cable in your walls from overheating. Essential, but they’ll happily let enough current through to kill a person.
RCDs — safety switches — protect people. They sense current leaking to earth, which is exactly what happens when someone touches something live, and they cut power in around 30 milliseconds.
If your board doesn’t have buttons marked “T” or “Test”, you don’t have them.
I find this most often in homes where a partial upgrade happened at some point — someone swapped ceramic fuses for breakers and stopped there. It’s better than nothing. It’s not what you’d want with children in the house.
Fixing it is usually part of a switchboard upgrade, and it’s the single highest-value electrical work most older Melbourne homes can have done.
Double adaptors doing the work of circuits
I see this in almost every home with children.
A bedroom built in 1965 with one power point, now running a lamp, a phone charger, a laptop, a heater and a game console through a stack of double adaptors and a power board plugged into another power board.
The circuit doesn’t know or care how many things are plugged in — it only sees total current. Pile enough on and the outlet heats up. Warm power points are how electrical fires start.
The fix is boring and cheap: more power points on properly loaded circuits. It’s one of the least glamorous jobs we do and one of the most worthwhile.
Old cable that nobody’s looked at
In the period homes through the eastern suburbs, I regularly find rubber-insulated cable from the 1950s and 60s in roof spaces. Rubber goes brittle with age and heat, and roof cavities in Melbourne get very hot. Eventually the insulation cracks and falls away from the conductor.
I also find pest damage more often than most homeowners would like to know. Possums and rats chew cable. There’s nothing malicious about it — it’s just what they do — but the result is bare conductor in a roof space full of dry timber and insulation.
Neither of these is visible from inside the house. Both are found by someone going up there and looking.
If the wiring in your home hasn’t been touched since the seventies, a house rewire is worth understanding the cost of, even if you don’t act on it immediately.
Previous work that shouldn’t have been done
Junction boxes with no cover. Cable joined with electrical tape inside a wall cavity. A downlight installed hard against insulation batts. An outdoor power point with no weatherproof cover on it.
Almost all of it is either DIY or a cheap job from years ago. It works — right up until it doesn’t — and the person who did it is long gone.
Meter panels that need dealing with
In homes of a certain vintage I sometimes find asbestos-backed meter panels. They’re not dangerous while they’re left alone, but they can’t be worked on or drilled into, and eventually something needs doing to them.
That’s a meter panel upgrade, and it needs to be handled properly by people who know what they’re dealing with.
What a safety check actually is
It’s an hour or so. I look at the switchboard, test the RCDs if there are any, check smoke alarms and their dates, get into the roof space where there’s access, check outdoor and wet area circuits, look at the power points and switches for heat damage, and test earthing.
Then you get a straight list: what’s fine, what should be done eventually, and what should be done soon. Sorted in that order, with no pressure attached to any of it.
If everything’s fine, I’ll tell you everything’s fine. That happens, and it’s a perfectly good outcome.
Why bother
Because the whole category of electrical problems in homes shares one feature: you don’t find out about them at a convenient moment.
If you’ve got young children, if you’ve just bought a place, if the house hasn’t been looked at in a decade, or if something’s been quietly bothering you — get in touch.
Registered Master Electrician. Over 200 five-star Google reviews. Lifetime workmanship warranty on everything we do.
If it’s something that can’t wait, we also do emergency and fault finding work.
