Switchboard Upgrades in Auckland

The Most Important Electrical Job in the House

The switchboard is where every circuit in your home starts and where every fault is supposed to be stopped. A modern switchboard does two things an old one cannot: it protects the wiring from overload with miniature circuit breakers (MCBs), and it protects people from electric shock with residual current devices (RCDs) - the safety switches that cut the power in a fraction of a second when current leaks to earth.

A lot of Auckland houses are still running on boards that were installed before either existed. Ceramic fuses, rewirable fuses, a board that has had circuits added to it by four different electricians over forty years, and no RCD protection at all. Those boards kept the lights on, but they were never designed for a house with a heat pump, an induction hob, a spa, an EV charger and a dozen chargers plugged in around the place.

Signs Your Switchboard Is Due

• Fuses instead of switches. Ceramic plug-in fuses or rewirable fuse wire mean the board predates modern protection.
• No RCDs. Look for switches with a small test button. If there are none, the circuits in your house have no shock protection.
• Breakers that trip when the oven, the dryer and the heat pump run at once, or a fuse that blows every few months.
• No room for another circuit. A full board with circuits doubled up on single breakers, which is unsafe as well as inconvenient.
• Warm, discoloured or buzzing. Any of these needs looking at now, not at the next renovation.
• You are adding load. Solar, a battery, an EV charger, a heat pump, a new kitchen or a spa can mean the board needs upgrading to take it. Not always - we check and tell you whether yours does.

What a Switchboard Upgrade Involves

We assess the existing board and the wiring that feeds it, then quote the whole job. On the day, the power is off for a few hours while the old board comes out and the new one goes in: a new enclosure, a main switch, RCD protection across the circuits, an MCB for each circuit, surge protection if you want it, and every circuit tested and clearly labelled so the next person - or you, at midnight with a torch - can see what is what. We finish by testing the whole installation and issuing the Certificate of Compliance.

If the wiring feeding the board has problems of its own, we will tell you before we start rather than discover it half way through. Old rubber-insulated or damaged cable is something we see in older Auckland homes, and the switchboard is the right time to deal with it.

Commercial Switchboards and Distribution Boards

For shops, offices and workshops we upgrade and extend distribution boards, add circuits for new equipment and three-phase machinery, and make sure the board is labelled and compliant for your insurer and your landlord. We can schedule the outage outside your trading hours.

Adding solar or an EV charger? We check the switchboard as part of that job and tell you whether it needs anything.