Electrician in Geelong

Almost every building in the city core is on a three phase supply, and in a mixed use building the metering arrangement is the first thing to untangle. Which meter feeds the shop, which feeds the offices above it, and what sits on the house supply for common lighting, the lift and the fire panel are questions answered at the site check, not from a photo of the board.

Once that is clear the work is straightforward enough. A dedicated circuit for a coffee machine, a bank of fryers or a server cabinet is a load calculation against the tenancy supply rather than the whole building. Where a tenancy has run out of headroom we look at rebalancing load across the three phases first, because rebalancing is a morning and a supply upgrade is a Powercor application with a lead time.

City allotments are built hard to the street and to both side boundaries. There is no side path to run a sub main down, so a cable route goes up an internal riser, through a ceiling space already shared with other services, or in from a rear laneway. In a bluestone or solid brick building it also means core drilling rather than chasing a wall.

That is the part of a city job that moves the price. Fittings cost what they cost. Getting conduit from a meter room at street level to a tenancy two floors up, through fire rated construction and around existing ductwork, is the labour. We walk the route and price it rather than quoting a rate per point and revising it on the day.

A commercial tenancy carries obligations a house does not. Emergency and exit lighting is discharge tested on a six monthly cycle, portable appliances are tested at intervals set by the environment they work in, and every final subcircuit picks up RCD protection when a board is replaced.

Most of what we find in the city is not dangerous, it is undocumented. The exit lights work but nobody holds the logbook, the board has been rearranged by two contractors and the schedule on the door stopped matching the breakers years ago. Bringing that back to a documented state costs less than people expect, and it is the first thing an insurer or an incoming tenant asks to see.

City rooftops are crowded. Condensers, lift motor rooms, exhaust risers and parapets break the roof into small pieces, and the older buildings hide a hipped roof behind a parapet, so the usable north plane is far smaller than the footprint suggests. Overshadowing from a taller neighbour is the second thing to check and it changes through the day.

The array gets designed around the services rather than the other way round. On a building facing Corio Bay the salt shortens the life of rail, fixings and rooftop isolators, so anything within sight of Eastern Beach is specified in marine grade. Powercor runs the network here, the same distributor as our own area, so the connection and export approvals go through a process we lodge every week.

Our workshop is at 11/23-25 Jordan Close, Altona, about 60km from the middle of Geelong. We are not going to tell you we are around the corner. We book Geelong work in blocks, a run of jobs on the same day or the same week, and when a job first goes in the diary we will tell you the week rather than the hour.

For city work that suits the job anyway, because building access, lift bookings and trading hour restrictions all have to be arranged in advance. Electrical sits under REC 37223 and solar and battery under SAA accreditation S3962281, you get a Certificate of Electrical Safety for the prescribed work, and there is a 100% workmanship guarantee on everything we install.