Enquiry at 10.21am. Paid and finished by 3.16pm.

An enquiry came through the website at 10.21 on a Thursday morning. We were on site nine minutes later, quoted by 10.54, and the work was finished and paid for before school pick-up.

We are not claiming that every job runs like this. Most do not, and most should not: a job worth doing properly is usually worth booking properly. But this one is worth writing up because it shows what happens when someone answers the phone, the van is nearby and the customer is ready to make a decision.

What was wrong

The homeowner had lost power to their cooktop. We went through the circuits and found the culprit was a faulty circuit breaker, which on its own is a small job. The bigger finding was the board it was sitting in.

Looking in the switchboard, they had no safety switches or electrocution protection devices on any of the circuits. So we’ve opted to upgrade the board for them, and we wanted to make sure it’s safe and all up to standard, so they can be confident in their wiring. If anything goes wrong, the power will turn off for them.

Michael, on site at Bossley Park

Not some of the circuits. None of them. In a home where the only protection is a circuit breaker, the breaker is there to protect the wiring from overload, not to protect a person from a shock. Those are two different devices doing two different jobs, and a lot of older boards only have the first one.

What was done, same afternoon

• Switchboard internals replaced, 18 pole, with individual safety switches installed in the existing enclosure. Old equipment disconnected, removed and disposed of, cables stripped, terminated, loomed and tidied, then tested and commissioned.
• An isolating switch installed in the enclosure.
• Surge protection installed.
• A 240V photoelectric smoke alarm replaced.
• A heat, light and fan unit replaced.
• A ceiling extractor fan replaced.
• Three double power points upgraded to 15 amp quad outlets.
• A double light switch replaced.

Before we left, the circuits were tested with an instrument and the test report was emailed to the customer along with the invoice, the same afternoon. A Certificate of Compliance for Electrical Work was lodged the following morning.

Why the extras matter

The call was about a cooktop. What the customer ended up with was a board with proper protection on every circuit, a new smoke alarm, a working exhaust fan, a heat light and fan unit that had clearly been on the list for a while, and three quad outlets where there had been doubles.

That is what an on-site assessment is for. We are not there to find extra work, we are there to look at the whole installation while we have the cover off, tell you what we can see, and give you a fixed price on all of it so you can decide. On this job the customer decided in 33 minutes.

Lost power to one appliance, or not sure what is protecting the circuits in your board? Our fault finding page covers how we diagnose it, and the switchboard upgrade page explains what a proper board should have. We are in Bossley Park most weeks.