Intercoms near you

In an apartment building the intercom is infrastructure, not an appliance. The entry panel, the cabling through the risers and the electrical supply feeding the system are common property, and in most schemes so is the station on the apartment wall, because it is part of a single system serving the whole building. That means replacing a handset, adding a camera at the entry or having the system reprogrammed is a decision for the owners corporation and an expense of the scheme, not of the individual lot owner.

The consequence in practice is procedural. An owner who wants a change raises it with the strata committee or manager, the committee obtains quotes, the scheme approves the spend in the way its rules require, and a contractor is engaged by the owners corporation. An owner who engages a contractor directly to work on common property, however reasonable the intent, is interfering with property they do not own and can be required to restore it.

The same logic applies to upgrades everybody wants. Replacing an ageing building-wide intercom is a scheme-level project with a scope, a budget and usually a special resolution, and it is the kind of work that belongs in a capital works plan rather than in an emergency. Raise it early, because a system that is failing intermittently is a system with no spare parts left.

The cabling is regulated by the ACMA. Cabling work connected to a telecommunications network must be performed by a registered cabler with the appropriate kind of registration, a registered cabler must directly supervise anyone unregistered doing cabling work, the work must comply with the customer cabling standard, and the cabler must prepare a written statement certifying compliance. Building risers are exactly the kind of installation those rules were written for.

Power is a separate trade again. An intercom needs a supply for the system itself, often a supply out to a gate station, and in a building a supply in a communications or plant room, and none of that may be done by the cabler unless that person also holds an electrical licence. Energy Safe Victoria's position on unqualified electrical work is that it is illegal as well as extremely dangerous, and in a strata building the consequence lands on the scheme rather than on one resident.

Where the intercom controls a lock or forms part of a security installation, state security licensing can apply as well. Western Australia, for example, licenses security installation work under its security installer scheme with classes for different equipment, and other states run their own. Ask a quote to identify who is doing what and what each person holds, because one person rarely holds all three.

The entry station lives outdoors, and in Australia that means ultraviolet, driving rain, heat and, near the coast, salt. Buttons, speaker grilles, camera lenses and the gaskets behind them are the first components to go, and an entry panel that has been in the weather for fifteen years usually fails progressively rather than all at once. Water entering a panel is the classic cause of a system that works in dry weather.

The second problem is the cable, and it is the expensive one. Where a building's riser cabling is degraded or was never suitable for the system being installed, an upgrade stops being a panel swap and becomes a building-wide cabling project. That is why quotes for apartment intercom replacement vary so much: one assumes the existing cable is usable, another does not.

The third is obsolescence. Systems whose manufacturer has left the market, or whose method of connecting to the outside world depends on a service type that is being retired, become unsupportable while still apparently working. Where an intercom relies on diverting calls over a telephone line or on a manufacturer's cloud service, ask what the plan is when that arrangement ends, because the answer decides whether you are buying ten years or three.

An intercom that records is a surveillance device, and that is governed by state and territory law rather than a national rule. Queensland's Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 makes it an offence to use a listening device to overhear, record, monitor or listen to a private conversation, with an exception where the person using the device is a party to that conversation, and Victoria has its own Surveillance Devices Act 1999. Because many door stations record audio by default, find the setting and decide deliberately, particularly where a station faces a shared landing or a footpath.

The equipment is goods and the installation is a service, and the ACCC says consumers automatically receive guarantees on both, including acceptable quality for the equipment and an acceptable level of care and skill for the work. In a strata scheme those rights belong to whoever contracted for the work, which is the owners corporation, so an individual owner unhappy with a building intercom raises it with the scheme rather than with the contractor.

On LokalMatch you describe the property, whether it is a house or a strata building, what the existing system is and your postcode in one request, and installers covering that postcode contact you; the requests they receive are what they pay for. LokalMatch does not do the work, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that respond.