Electrical Connections and Supply Upgrades

Connection is a broad term. These are the jobs that fall under it, and they range from an afternoon to several weeks depending on who else has to be involved.

This is the part that trips people up. In Victoria, four parties are usually involved and each has a defined role. Your electrician does the installation work on your side of the point of supply and lodges the electronic connection request with the distributor. The distributor, in most of Melbourne's west that is Powercor, owns the network up to the point of supply and approves and energises the connection.

Metering is separate again. Since the national metering reforms, meters belong to your electricity retailer and are installed by a metering provider they engage, not by the distributor and not by your electrician. So if you want a new meter, an upgraded meter or a meter moved, the request goes through your retailer, and the retailer instructs their metering provider. We prepare the panel, do the wiring, submit the paperwork and chase the pieces so you are not caught between three call centres. The Certificate of Electrical Safety for the installation work comes from us as the licensed REC.

Three phase is not automatically better. It costs more to install, needs a larger board and, if the street does not have three phase available at your frontage, the cost can move from a few thousand dollars to a great deal more.

The honest test is whether you have a load that needs it. Ducted air conditioning above a certain size, a workshop with three-phase machinery, a large solar array with a three-phase inverter, a commercial kitchen, or a genuine need to charge two EVs at 22kW are real reasons. Wanting faster overnight car charging on its own usually is not, because a single-phase 7kW charger already fills most batteries overnight. We will price both and tell you which one we would choose in your position.

This is the calculation more homes need and fewer get. When you add induction cooking, heat pump hot water, reverse cycle heating and an EV charger to a house built around a gas stove and a gas heater, the electrical load roughly doubles. The consumer mains and the service fuse were sized for the old house.

Maximum demand is calculated using the method set out in Appendix C of AS/NZS 3000, which applies diversity factors to each type of load rather than simply adding up nameplate ratings. Running that calculation before you commit to an electrification plan tells you whether the existing mains will carry it, whether load management on the EV charger solves the problem more cheaply than new mains, or whether the supply genuinely needs upgrading. Doing it after the fact is how people end up paying for a switchboard twice.

Connecting a generator to a house is connection work with its own standard. AS/NZS 3010 covers the installation of generating sets, and the critical requirement is that the generator can never be connected to the network at the same time as the supply. That is achieved with a changeover switch that mechanically prevents both being live together.

Running a generator into a power point with a double-ended lead is the practice this exists to prevent. It back-feeds the street through your service, which can energise conductors that a network worker believes are dead. We install a proper inlet and changeover arrangement so that a generator can be connected safely, and we label it so that anyone else working on the installation knows it is there.

Our part of the work is usually a day or less. The waiting is on the other parties. A straightforward meter exchange arranged through a retailer commonly takes one to three weeks. A new connection to a new build depends on the distributor's assessment and scheduling. Anything requiring network augmentation, such as extending three phase down a street, is measured in months rather than weeks.

We tell you the realistic timeline at quote stage, submit the paperwork the same week where we can, and give you the reference numbers so you can follow it up directly if you want to. Nothing about this process rewards guessing, so we would rather set the expectation accurately at the start.