Power Outage and Storm Preparation for Melbourne Homes

Power goes out and the instinct is to start flicking switches. Do the diagnosis first, because it takes thirty seconds and it decides who you should be calling.

Look outside. If the street lights are out and your neighbours are dark too, this is a network outage and there is nothing at your switchboard to fix. Melbourne west is served mainly by Powercor, with Jemena covering parts of the north west, and the faults and emergencies number is printed on your electricity bill. Save it in your phone now rather than searching for a bill by torchlight later.

If everyone else has power and you do not, the fault is on your side of the point of supply and it is an electrician job. Go to the switchboard with a torch, not a candle, and look at the switches. Something will usually be in the off or middle position.

Before you touch anything, stop and use your nose and your eyes. A burning or fishy plastic smell, visible scorching, warmth at the board, or any buzzing or crackling changes the situation entirely. In that case do not reset anything. Turn off the main switch if you can reach it safely and call an emergency electrician. A hot switchboard is a fire in its early stage and every reset feeds it.

A safety switch, or RCD, trips because it has detected current leaking somewhere it should not be going, which in the worst case is through a person. A circuit breaker trips because a circuit is drawing more current than it should. Both are the board doing its job, and neither should be treated as an inconvenience to be overridden.

The safe sequence is straightforward. Unplug or switch off every appliance on the affected part of the house, including anything in the kitchen, the laundry and any outdoor equipment. Then reset the tripped device firmly to the on position. If it holds, plug appliances back in one at a time, waiting a moment between each. The one that trips it again is your culprit, and that appliance stays unplugged until it is repaired or replaced.

If the device trips straight back in with everything unplugged, stop. That is a fault in the fixed wiring rather than in an appliance, and it needs fault finding with test instruments. Resetting a protective device repeatedly against a genuine fault is how a small fault becomes a fire.

One reset is reasonable. Two is a judgement call. Three is not something we would do in our own house.

The western suburbs catch weather off the bay and off the plains, and the pattern is familiar. A hot northerly, a fast change, wind, and then the calls start. There are three distinct problems that come out of a Melbourne storm and they need different responses.

The first is physical damage. Branches into service lines, a fallen line, damage to the point of attachment on the house, or a tile off the roof letting water into a ceiling space where wiring runs. A line down or damaged is a call to 000 and the distributor. Stay at least eight metres clear, keep children and animals back, and never assume a line on the ground is dead.

The second is water. Water into a meter box, into a switchboard, or into a ceiling above downlights is a live hazard and it does not announce itself. If a ceiling is bulging or dripping near a light fitting, turn that circuit off at the board before anyone goes near it, and do not stand in water to reach a switch. Older homes around Newport, Spotswood and Yarraville with original wiring in the roof space are the ones where this bites hardest, and if the wiring is already at the end of its life a wet ceiling is often what exposes it.

The third is surge, which is the one people discover a week later.

A surge is a very short spike in voltage. It comes from lightning, from network switching when supply is restored after an outage, or from a fault on the network. The spike itself lasts microseconds. The damage does not.

What people expect is a bang and a dead appliance. What usually happens is quieter. Electronics take a partial hit that degrades a power supply or a control board, the appliance keeps working, and it fails three weeks later for no apparent reason. The television, the modem, the solar inverter, the oven control board, the ducted heating controller and the garage door opener are the usual casualties, and the insurance conversation is much harder when the failure is a month after the storm.

A surge diverter fitted at the switchboard clamps the spike before it gets into the house wiring, which protects everything downstream rather than only what is plugged into a particular power board. It is a cheap addition when a board is already open, which is why we suggest it whenever we do a switchboard upgrade, and considerably more expensive as a standalone call out.

Board level protection is not a substitute for point of use protection on the most sensitive gear. Use both on a home office, a solar inverter or an expensive entertainment setup. And after any storm outage, it is worth walking the house and checking that everything came back on properly, including the alarm, the smoke alarms and anything on a timer.

A common assumption is that a house with solar keeps running in a blackout. It does not. A standard grid connected solar system shuts down when the grid goes down, deliberately, so that it cannot energise a network line that someone is working on. Sun on the roof and no power in the house is normal and it surprises people every summer.

A home battery can provide backup, but only if it was specified and wired for it. Backup requires additional equipment and a changeover arrangement at the switchboard, and it usually feeds a nominated set of essential circuits rather than the whole house. That is a design decision made at installation, not a setting you can enable later without work.

The essential circuits people choose are fairly consistent. Fridge and freezer, some lighting, a few power points for phones and a modem, and the gas heater controls if there is one. What does not go on backup is anything with a large draw, so no ducted air conditioning, no oven, no instantaneous hot water. A battery sized for evening self consumption will not run a whole house through a summer day at 38 degrees, and anyone suggesting otherwise is selling.

Our guide on whether a home battery is worth it in Melbourne west goes through the economics. For blackout resilience specifically, decide early, because retrofitting backup to an existing battery installation costs meaningfully more than specifying it at the start.

Most of the preparation worth doing is not dramatic and it is cheaper than any of the consequences.

Know where your switchboard is and make sure you can get to it without moving a bookcase. Have a torch that works in a known place, and make sure the phone charger is not the only way anyone in the house sees at night. Label the circuits, or ask for it next time an electrician is in the board, because a labelled board turns a five minute diagnosis into a thirty second one.

Check that the board actually has RCD protection. A surprising number of homes across Braybrook, Maidstone and Sunshine North still run boards with breakers and no safety switches, which means the circuits are protected but the people are not. That is the single most valuable upgrade in this whole guide.

Trim vegetation near the service line to the house, and take the roof seriously. Most storm related electrical damage we attend starts as a water problem rather than an electrical one.

We would much rather someone called and was told to wait until Tuesday than sat up all night worrying about something that could not hurt them, or poked at something that could.

Call immediately for a burning smell, smoke or arcing anywhere in the installation, exposed conductors after storm damage, water over electrical equipment or into the board, a shock from a tap or an appliance, a fallen or damaged line, or a main switch that trips again straight after a reset. These are the calls our 24/7 line exists for.

Call in normal hours for a circuit that trips only when a specific appliance runs, a dead power point, a light that has stopped working, or a board that is old and full but not doing anything alarming. That is ordinary electrical work and paying an after hours premium for it is money for nothing.

We are based in Altona and cover the western suburbs, so a van reaches most addresses in the area quickly, which matters at two in the morning. See our service areas for the full list, or if you are local to Williamstown or Altona North we are minutes away. To book non urgent work, contact us. For a live fault, call 0401 500 446 at any hour.