One of the things I love about doing switchboard work across Sydney is that no two boards are ever the same. Even two houses on the same street, built in the same year by the same builder, will have completely different stories inside the meter box by the time we open them up. Last month we wrapped up a job in Mosman that’s a perfect example. The owners had bought a beautiful red-brick double-storey home that had been in the same family since 1962, and after their building inspector flagged the switchboard as a concern, they called us to take a proper look. What we found, and what we did about it, is a story I think a lot of Sydney homeowners can learn something from — so I wanted to share it.
What we found when we opened the board
The original switchboard was tucked behind a small timber door in the front porch — a beautifully made little cabinet with a brass latch that clearly hadn’t been touched in years. When I lifted the cover, I found exactly what I expected for a 1962 Mosman build: a panel of ceramic rewireable fuses, a single main switch, no safety switches anywhere, and an asbestos-backed mounting board behind everything. Two of the fuses had been replaced with the wrong wire gauge — somebody, sometime, had gone to Bunnings and bought what looked closest. Three circuits had been added over the decades to handle a kitchen renovation, a downstairs extension, and an outdoor pizza oven, and they’d been bodged into spare ways with no real plan. It was, in short, exactly the kind of board that belongs in a museum, not a working family home.
The conversation with the homeowners
I always try to give clients honest information rather than a hard sell, and the conversation we had on the front step that afternoon went something like this: yes, the board is technically still working; no, it doesn’t meet current safety standards by a long way; and yes, the asbestos mounting needs to be removed by a licensed asbestos removalist before we can put a new board in. The homeowners had two young kids and were already planning solar and a battery for the back roof. Replacing the board now made every other plan they had simpler. We talked about what a modern board looks like (one RCBO per circuit, plenty of spare ways for future loads, proper labelling, AS/NZS 3000 compliance), and they made the decision to do the job properly rather than patch it up. For more on the warning signs we look for in a board, our piece on the signs your Sydney home needs a switchboard upgrade covers most of what we found in this Mosman job.
The asbestos challenge
This is the part of the job that surprises a lot of clients. We can’t just rip out an asbestos-backed board ourselves — it has to come out under a separate work order from a licensed removalist with proper containment, air monitoring and disposal. We coordinated this for the Mosman job: removalist Tuesday morning to strip the panel, certified the area, and we returned Tuesday afternoon to install the new enclosure. It adds a half-day to the project and a fair bit of cost, but it’s not optional in any home built before about 1985, which covers an enormous slice of Sydney’s older suburbs.
What the new board looks like
The replacement board is a modern Schneider Electric flush-mount enclosure sized for plenty of future expansion. Every circuit now has its own RCBO (combined RCD and circuit breaker) — kitchen, bathrooms, laundry, lights, power points up and down, the air conditioning, the outdoor pizza oven, all separately protected. We added isolation provisions and labelling for the future solar inverter and a sub-board feed for the planned battery system, so when those installers come back next year they’re not opening up a board that needs work all over again. Every cable is freshly terminated, every breaker labelled in plain English on the face of the board so the homeowners can find the right switch in an outage, and the whole installation is photographed and certified for compliance.
Power-off time and what the homeowners actually experienced
The full board changeover took us about five hours of power-off, between 8:30am and 1:30pm. We set up a temporary supply for the fridge and freezer through an extension cord from a neighbour’s external power point (with their kind permission), kept the kettle going on a portable gas burner, and the kids spent the morning at a friend’s place. By mid-afternoon every circuit was back on, every safety switch tested, and the board was sitting tidy and labelled in its new flush-mount cupboard. For people curious about what these days actually look like from inside the home, our walk-through of a typical switchboard upgrade installation day covers it in more detail.
Why this matters for other Mosman, Cremorne and Neutral Bay homes
Mosman and the surrounding Lower North Shore suburbs are full of homes from this era — Federation cottages that have been extended, post-war family homes, classic 1960s brick-and-tile builds. Almost every one of them has a switchboard story like this hiding behind a small porch door. If you’ve recently bought one of these houses, or your building inspector has flagged the board, the worst thing you can do is shrug and hope it’ll be fine for another decade. Old boards don’t just slowly age — they fail suddenly, often during a hot summer when the load is highest, and an asbestos-backed board failing is a much bigger and more expensive problem than a planned upgrade.
Planning ahead for solar, EVs and batteries
The Mosman job was a great example of why we always ask about future plans before specifying a new board. The owners are doing solar and a battery in the next twelve months, and their daughter is already pushing for an EV charger to be ready when she gets her licence. Building all of that capacity into the new board now adds a small amount to the install cost but saves a much larger amount of rework later. Our previous articles on preparing for solar and battery storage and EV chargers and switchboard upgrades go into more detail.
Safety switches: still the most important upgrade
If there’s one thing I want every homeowner to take away from this story, it’s how dramatic the safety improvement is when you go from a 1960s board to a modern one. The old board offered zero protection against electric shock — it was built to stop wires overheating, nothing more. The new board cuts power within 30 milliseconds if even a tiny current leaks to earth. For a young family in a home that includes a pool, an outdoor kitchen, bathrooms, a laundry, and the usual collection of older appliances, that’s the difference between a non-event and a tragedy. We covered this in detail in our piece on safety switches vs circuit breakers.
If your board looks anything like the one we found
If you’re reading this and your switchboard has any combination of ceramic fuses, a wooden mounting panel, a single main switch, or no test buttons anywhere, the conversation worth having is sooner rather than later. We work across all of Sydney from the Lower North Shore down through the Eastern Suburbs and out to the Inner West, and we’re always happy to come and have a look before you commit to anything. The Mosman family ended up with a board that’ll comfortably take them into solar, batteries, EVs and whatever the next two decades bring. Most Sydney homes can do the same with a single well-planned day’s work.