Most people in Five Dock 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.
We cover Five Dock along with Haberfield, Croydon, Ashfield and the rest of Sydney. You get a fixed price up front, there is no call out fee, and our labour carries a lifetime guarantee.
Five Dock 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.
A lot of the calls we get from Five Dock start the same way: the board trips, someone resets it, and a week later it trips again. That pattern usually means a fault worth finding properly.
Anything you can smell or see. A burning or fishy plastic smell near an outlet or the board, visible scorching, sparking when you plug something in, or a switchboard that is hot to touch. Turn the power off at the main switch if you can do it safely and ring someone.
Water and electricity together is the other one. A leak into a light fitting, a flooded subfloor with wiring in it, or storm damage to the service line. Do not go near it, and do not try to isolate it yourself if there is standing water.
A circuit that keeps tripping is less dramatic but still worth attention. The safety switch is doing its job, which means something is leaking current. Repeatedly resetting it without finding the cause is how a nuisance becomes a fire.
A lot of it is previous work. Extensions, added outlets and half finished jobs by whoever was cheapest at the time. You end up with a system nobody has ever looked at as a whole.
Storms take a toll, especially on anything overhead. A surge through the supply can quietly damage a board or an appliance and the symptoms show up weeks later.
We do not publish a price for this, and you should be careful of anyone who does. Two houses in Five Dock 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 Five Dock 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 Five Dock, 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.