Booking an electrician in Potts Point usually starts badly. Something has tripped, something smells hot, or a job you thought was small has turned into a bigger one. What you want at that point is a straight answer about what it will take and what it will cost, not a rate per hour and a shrug.
We work across Potts Point and the suburbs around it, including Darlinghurst, Paddington, Double Bay. The price is agreed before anything starts, coming out to look costs nothing, and the labour is guaranteed for as long as you own the place.
Potts Point has the mix you find across a lot of Sydney: older homes still running the board they were built with, sitting next to places that have been renovated two or three times. Both throw up their own problems, and both are jobs we do every week.
A lot of the calls we get from Potts Point start the same way: the board trips, someone resets it, and a week later it trips again. That pattern usually means a fault worth finding properly.
The part people underestimate is the mounting, not the wiring. A fan puts a constant vibrating load on the ceiling, so it has to be fixed to something structural. Screwing a fan into plasterboard alone is how they end up wobbling and eventually coming loose.
If you are replacing an existing light with a fan, there is often no separate switch for the fan speed, so that needs running or a remote fitted. Worth knowing before you buy the fan.
In older Potts Point homes the ceiling rose may not be in the middle of the room, which matters more with a fan than with a light. We can usually move it, but it is easier to know that before we start.
Most of what we find comes down to load. The house is doing far more electrically than it was built to do, and the weakest joint in the chain is where it shows up first.
Water gets in more often than people expect. A roof leak above a light fitting, condensation in an outdoor outlet, or a subfloor that stays damp will all eventually cause tripping.
There is no honest way to put a single figure on this page, because the price depends on what is behind your wall. Anyone quoting you a firm number over the phone without seeing the job is guessing, and the gap between the guess and the invoice is usually yours to pay.
What we can promise is the shape of it. We come out and look for nothing, we work out what the job actually needs, and we give you one fixed number for the whole thing. If we find something unexpected once we are into it, we stop and talk to you rather than adding it to the bill. The number you agreed is the number on the invoice.
An hourly rate puts the risk on you. Every delay, every trip back to the van, every part that turns out to be the wrong one lands on your invoice. That is the opposite of what most people in Potts Point actually want, which is to know the number before they say yes.
We price the job, not the time. That means we carry the risk of it taking longer, which is a good incentive for us to turn up prepared. It also means you can say yes or no with the full number in front of you.
Almost nothing, and that is not us protecting our own work. In New South Wales it is against the law for an unlicensed person to do fixed electrical wiring, and the insurance consequences of a fire traced back to unlicensed work are severe. Replacing a plug top on an appliance or changing a lamp is fine. Anything behind the wall or inside the board is not.
Before you call, switch off the appliance you suspect and see whether the problem goes away. If the board holds with that one thing unplugged, you have found it, and the visit gets much shorter.
If you rent, electrical repairs to the property itself are the owner's responsibility, and urgent electrical faults fall under urgent repairs in New South Wales. Talk to your agent first. If it is genuinely dangerous, say so clearly, because that changes how quickly it has to be dealt with.
If you manage a strata block around Potts Point, we can work on common property and bill the body corporate directly, and we can keep the same electrician on your building so nobody is relearning the site every visit.
