Most people in Sydney do not go looking for an electrician until something has already stopped working. The light in the hallway starts flickering, the board trips every time the kettle goes on, or there is a smell near a power point that was not there yesterday. By that point you are not comparing five quotes, you want someone who answers the phone and can tell you what is actually wrong.
Sydney is inside our normal run, as are Sydenham, Sydney, Sydney Olympic Park. We quote the whole job as one number before we start, and we do not charge to come and look at it.
Sydney has the mix you find across a lot of Sydney: older homes still running the board they were built with, sitting next to places that have been renovated two or three times. Both throw up their own problems, and both are jobs we do every week.
Renovating in Sydney is usually when the wiring gets looked at properly for the first time in decades. Better to know before the walls close up.
Most of what we find comes down to load. The house is doing far more electrically than it was built to do, and the weakest joint in the chain is where it shows up first.
Rodents are a genuine cause and an unglamorous one. Possums and rats in the roof chew cable insulation, and the fault that follows can be intermittent and hard to trace.
We do not publish a price for this, and you should be careful of anyone who does. Two houses in Sydney on the same street can need very different work depending on the age of the wiring and what has been added to it over the years.
What we can promise is the shape of it. We come out and look for nothing, we work out what the job actually needs, and we give you one fixed number for the whole thing. If we find something unexpected once we are into it, we stop and talk to you rather than adding it to the bill. The number you agreed is the number on the invoice.
An hourly rate puts the risk on you. Every delay, every trip back to the van, every part that turns out to be the wrong one lands on your invoice. That is the opposite of what most people in Sydney actually want, which is to know the number before they say yes.
We price the job, not the time. That means we carry the risk of it taking longer, which is a good incentive for us to turn up prepared. It also means you can say yes or no with the full number in front of you.
Almost nothing, and that is not us protecting our own work. In New South Wales it is against the law for an unlicensed person to do fixed electrical wiring, and the insurance consequences of a fire traced back to unlicensed work are severe. Replacing a plug top on an appliance or changing a lamp is fine. Anything behind the wall or inside the board is not.
What you can usefully do is narrow it down before you ring. Note which circuit trips, whether it trips straight away or after something specific gets switched on, and whether it started after a storm or a new appliance. That saves time on site.
If you rent, electrical repairs to the property itself are the owner's responsibility, and urgent electrical faults fall under urgent repairs in New South Wales. Talk to your agent first. If it is genuinely dangerous, say so clearly, because that changes how quickly it has to be dealt with.
If you manage a strata block around Sydney, we can work on common property and bill the body corporate directly, and we can keep the same electrician on your building so nobody is relearning the site every visit.
