Upgrade Your Switchboard. Fixed Price in 2 Business Days.

Ceramic rewireable fuses on the board, plug-in fuse wedges, a black bakelite face, breakers that trip when the kettle and toaster run together, a warm panel front, a buzzing or burnt smell near the meter, or a defect notice from Ausgrid or Endeavour Energy. Insurers are knocking back renewals on aged switchboards too. Two or more of those? Send us a photo and we'll tell you what we see.

A standard single-phase home swap is on and off in a day. We isolate at the point of attachment, strip the old enclosure out, mount the new board, run new consumer mains where needed, fit a safety switch on every circuit, safety-test everything, and switch the power back on. Three-phase upgrades, commercial boards in places like Norwest or Smithfield, and jobs with metering position changes can run one to three days depending on scope and access.

On a standard single-phase swap the supply is off for roughly four to six hours through the middle of the day. The fridge and freezer will hold fine if you keep the doors shut — we tell you the night before to chill a couple of bottles of water as ice packs. Three-phase or jobs where the metering position moves can run longer; we'll give you the actual outage window in the written quote so you can plan.

The fixed-price quote is the price. If we open the wall and find a surprise (degraded consumer mains, a buried junction, asbestos backing that wasn't visible from the front photo), we stop, ring you, explain it in plain English, and price the variation before anyone touches a tool. Nothing gets added without your go-ahead. No day-rate creep, no extras dropped on the invoice.

Someone needs to be on site at the start so we can confirm the scope, isolate the supply, and walk you through what we find. After that you're welcome to head out — we'll text when we're ready to recommission and need someone to flick appliances back on and check the test results with us before we leave.

No. Switchboard work is electrical, not building work, so council isn't involved. What you do need is a Level 2 ASP for anything touching the point of attachment, consumer mains, metering position or the network connection. Thorntek is ASP 4869 accredited for overhead, underground and metering with Ausgrid and Endeavour Energy. We lodge every notification and sign every certificate. You sign once, we handle the rest of the paperwork end to end.

Several Australian home insurers are flagging ceramic rewireable and asbestos-backed boards at renewal, especially on Federation cottages through the Inner West and Eastern Suburbs. Some won't renew without a compliance certificate. After the upgrade we issue a CCEW (Certificate of Compliance Electrical Work) lodged with NSW Fair Trading — that's what the insurer wants on file.

As a rough guide, standard single-phase residential swaps typically land between $2,800 and $4,500. Three-phase boards, long consumer mains runs, a new point of attachment, asbestos backing remediation, or a metering position change push the number higher. We don't pull a figure out of thin air — that's how shocks land on the invoice. The photo audit gives us enough to write a fixed-price quote that holds.

Yes. Most pre-2000 boards in Sydney don't have the spare space or the supply capacity for a 32 amp EV charger plus a battery inverter plus the existing household load. We size the new board for the gear that's coming — the wallbox, the battery, the ducted reverse cycle — not just what's plugged in today.

Older switchboards across Sydney's older housing stock often sit on a sheet of asbestos cement backing. We don't perform contamination work ourselves — that scope is excluded from our quote and we coordinate licensed asbestos removal before we install the new board. You get one timeline and one point of contact. The new board mounts to fresh, compliant backing and is earth-leakage tested before recommissioning.