Wiring & Rewiring near you

AS/NZS 3000, the Wiring Rules, is the standard Australian electrical installations are built to, and it is called up by the electricity legislation of every state and territory. It is also not retrospective in ordinary circumstances: an installation that complied when it was built is not required to be rebuilt each time a new edition is published, which is why so many Australian houses still have circuits that would not be installed that way today.

The exception is the work you are asking for. New work and altered work have to meet the requirements in force when that work is done, and among those requirements is additional protection by residual current device on final subcircuits in domestic installations. The practical consequence is that extending an unprotected old circuit is usually not the cheap option people imagine, because the electrician cannot leave the altered circuit in its previous state.

This is why honest quoting for small electrical jobs in an old house comes with a caveat. Ask the electrician directly what they expect to find, and what the job becomes if the circuit they open is not in a condition they can lawfully extend.

A full rewire replaces every circuit from the switchboard to every point, and usually includes a new switchboard because the old one has nowhere left to put the protective devices the new circuits need. It is the only version that resets the clock on the whole house, and it is the version that makes sense during a renovation when linings are already off.

A partial rewire replaces specific circuits: the kitchen, the wet areas, the circuits with the oldest cable, or everything on one side of the house. It is the realistic answer for an occupied home with a budget, and it works well when it is planned as stage one of something rather than improvised as a patch.

Sitting underneath both is the supply. The consumer mains running from the point of attachment or the pillar to the switchboard are part of the customer's installation, and in an older house they are often the smallest cable in the whole system. Where that cable has to be upsized, the distribution network business is involved as well as your electrician, so it needs to be identified at quoting time rather than discovered on the day.

Roof-space heat is the constraint nobody outside the trade thinks about. A roof cavity in most of the country becomes dangerously hot through the middle of a summer day, which is why rewiring crews start at dawn and stop before the afternoon, and why quotes for summer work sometimes assume shorter days. It is also the reason the cable up there aged the way it did.

Construction type decides the rest. A timber-framed single-storey house with a hipped roof and a decent crawl space is the easy case. A double-brick house with a concrete first floor, a two-storey home with no roof access above the lower floor, a house with foil-backed sarking, or a cottage with cable chased into solid plaster all mean more surface work and more patching. So does asbestos-containing wall lining or a switchboard panel of that era, which is a separate trade and is covered in the switchboard replacement guide rather than here.

Finally, occupied houses have contents. Roof spaces full of stored boxes, ceilings full of insulation, and built-in wardrobes against the walls where cable needs to drop all add time. Clearing access before the crew arrives is the one genuinely useful thing an owner can do.

There is no homeowner version of a rewire. Western Australia puts the rule most plainly of the state regulators: all electrical work must be carried out by a person who holds the relevant electrical licence, and it is illegal for an unlicensed person to carry out electrical work, including modifications to fixed wiring. A rewire is nothing but modification to fixed wiring, from the first cable pulled to the last point terminated, so there is no part of it that falls outside the prohibition.

Unlicensed work is not only an offence. It is also the thing an insurer will look for after a fire, and a claim on a house rewired by someone without a licence is a claim with a serious problem attached.

Expect documentation. In New South Wales the electrician lodges a Certificate of Compliance for Electrical Work. In Western Australia the electrical contractor must give you an electrical safety certificate within twenty-eight days for work other than maintenance or a like-for-like replacement. Keep those certificates with the test results and the board schedule, because they are what the next electrician, the next buyer and the insurer will ask for.

A rewire is a service and the fittings are goods, and the ACCC says consumers automatically receive guarantees on both. The service guarantee that matters here is care and skill, and the goods guarantees are acceptable quality and fitness for a purpose you made known. Write down what you told the electrician the house had to do afterwards, because in a staged rewire the disputes are almost always about scope rather than workmanship.

On LokalMatch you describe the house, its age, how much access there is and your postcode once, and electricians working that area 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 anyone who gets in touch, so comparing what each quote includes, and confirming the licence, is yours to do.