Australia's first television signal went out from Artarmon Road in 1956. The suburb that switched the country on still runs, street by street, on wiring from that decade, and that is exactly the work we do best.
Pricing agreed before we start. We usually reply the same day.
On the evening of 16 September 1956, from studios on Artarmon Road, TCN-9 put Australia's first regular television broadcast to air. Bruce Gyngell's welcome went out at 100,000 watts of vision power, into a suburb where the houses receiving it were running on four fuses each. From 1965 the site's 233 metre tower stood over the district, tall enough to be nicknamed after the Eiffel, until it came down in 2021, a year or so after Nine moved the network to North Sydney.
The suburb around the studios is interwar to its bones: brick bungalows on quiet streets between Penshurst Street and the Flat Rock valley, most built in the twenties and thirties, and 56.5 per cent of homes are still separate houses. These are wonderful, solid, double-brick houses. Their wiring is another matter, because a house built before television was wired for lights, a stove and not much else, and many boards here have simply had the decades piled on top.
Now the story has turned over. The studio site itself is becoming 460 new apartments in ten mid-rise buildings, which means the newest electrical installations on the lower North Shore are rising in the middle of some of its oldest. Two electrical generations are about to share the same few streets, and we work happily in both.
That is the local condition in one sentence: a suburb wired in the fuse era, being lived in at car-charger intensity. Most of our Willoughby work is the gap between those two.
The clearest way to see seventy years of electrical history is to open two switchboards on the same street. Both of these are real Willoughby boards.
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What it means: the house on the left is not rare here, it is common, and it is running every modern appliance through protection designed when the television was the newest load in the room. The board on the right is what the same house gets in a day's work: a circuit for each real load, a safety switch on every one of them, surge protection while the board is open, and spare ways so the next decade's ideas are an afternoon's work instead of another upgrade.
Seventy years of add-ons leave signatures. These are the four we see most, and what each one actually means.
Ceramic fuses, still in service
Rewirable fuses protect cable, slowly, and people not at all. No test buttons on the board means no safety switches on the circuits, which is the single most important thing to fix in any interwar house.
A board upgrade is a day's work, done live-in, and it is the foundation every other job stands on.
One power circuit doing the whole house
The kettle, the heater, the microwave and three power boards, all on protection sized for a 1950s household. It holds until winter, then trips every evening at dinner time.
The fix is more circuits, not bigger fuses. Bigger fuses are how cable gets cooked inside walls.
Layers of every decade since
A sixties stove circuit, seventies rubber cable, eighties extensions, a nineties spa, all spliced onto the original four ways. Each addition was reasonable; the total is not.
We map what is actually connected, then rationalise it into a board with a way for each real load.
The black panel behind it all
Boards of this era were often mounted on asbestos-cement panels. Left undisturbed they are stable, but an upgrade has to deal with them properly, not drill through them.
We handle and dispose of old panels in line with the rules, as a routine part of the job.
The old Nine site is 3.2 hectares, and it is becoming 460 apartments in ten mid-rise buildings with 6,000 square metres of public space between them. Those apartments will arrive with the newest residential electrical installations in the postcode: safety switches on everything, data cabled to every room, provision the interwar streets around them have never had.
We think that contrast is good for the whole suburb, because it makes the gap visible. A buyer who walks out of a display apartment and into a 1950s bungalow can see the difference at the switchboard in ten seconds, and the bungalow's gap is entirely closable: board, safety switches, circuits where the loads actually are, and wiring brought forward era by era. The house stays interwar on the outside and becomes current behind the walls.
In the new buildings themselves, our work is the personal layer inside your own walls, and the strata layer beyond them through owners corporation arrangements: common area lighting, basement provisioning, the jobs a big residential building generates from day one.
Everything is certified: we lodge a Certificate of Compliance for Electrical Work within 7 days of testing, through the BCNSW eCert portal since 1 July 2026.
Willoughby renovates rather than demolishes. The double-brick bungalow gets a new kitchen, an opened-up rear, ducted air conditioning, sometimes a studio over the garage, and every one of those decisions lands, eventually, at the switchboard. Induction cooking wants its own circuit. So does the air conditioning. So does a car charger. A four-way fuse board has room for none of them, which is why the board is the first line of any renovation plan we write, not the last.
The order of operations matters more than people expect. Boards first, so the house can carry what is coming. New circuits while the walls are open, because that is when they are cheap. And whatever vintage wiring the renovation exposes gets dealt with then, because closing fresh plasterboard over rubber-insulated cable from the fifties just seals the problem in for the next owner. Our rewiring page explains what each era of cable means when it turns up.
Double brick shapes the craft here too. Chasing new runs through solid masonry, fishing cable through cavity walls that were never meant to be fished, finding routes that spare the original plasterwork: it is slower than gyprock work and we plan and price it honestly rather than discovering it mid-job.
Not a generic service list. This is what actually comes in from this postcode.
The suburb's signature job: fuse-era boards brought current in a day, a safety switch on every circuit, and old asbestos panels handled properly on the way through.
Switchboard upgradesDouble-brick bungalows rewired era by era, routes planned around original plasterwork, staged so you keep living there while it happens.
Electrical rewiringThe first TV suburb now streams everything, and wifi through solid masonry is a losing fight. Hard-wired points to the rooms that matter settle it permanently.
Data cablingDownlights that respect ornate ceilings, new switching without scarring original plaster, and garden lighting for the deep blocks off Penshurst Street.
Lighting installationInterwar houses full of modern electronics deserve a switchboard device standing in front of all of it, fitted while the board is open for its upgrade.
Surge protectionOld electric storage units swapped like for like, or the circuit made ready for a heat pump, sized against what the board can actually carry.
Hot water installationFrom the Penshurst Street shops to the Flat Rock valley, and every quiet brick street between.
It means the house is running on 1950s protection. A rewirable fuse protects the cable, eventually, but it does nothing to protect people, and it tells us there is probably no safety switch on those circuits at all. The fix is not dramatic: the board is upgraded in place in a day, every circuit gets its own safety switch, and the rest of the wiring can then be assessed honestly. In Willoughby we do this job weekly, usually in houses whose boards have not been touched since the television era.
Because the house is probably still running most of its power points on one or two circuits, which was generous in 1956 and is absurd now. Every double adaptor and power board since has been piled onto the same pair of fuses. The lasting fix is more circuits from a modern board, splitting the kitchen from the living areas, so the load is spread the way the house is actually used rather than the way it was used seventy years ago.
Board first, always. The switchboard sets what the renovation can have: induction needs a circuit of its own, so does ducted air conditioning, so does a car charger, and a four-fuse board has room for none of them. We plan the board for the finished house, run the new circuits while walls are open, and rewire whatever vintage cable the renovation exposes, because closing new plasterboard over old rubber-insulated wiring is how problems get sealed in for another thirty years.
Usually yes, and the honest answer starts at the switchboard rather than the driveway. A charger is one of the largest loads a house can carry, so we check what the board and the supply can take, upgrade the board if it is still fuse-era, and run the charger on its own protected circuit. Done in that order it is a clean job. Done charger-first, it is how boards end up overloaded.
New apartments are wired well, but they are wired generically. What owners actually call us for is the personal layer: extra power points where furniture really went, lighting changed from builder-standard, a wall-mounted television without visible cables, and data points where the router should have been. Anything beyond your own walls belongs to the owners corporation, and we work under strata arrangements when a job crosses that line.
Boards of that era were often mounted on asbestos-cement panels, so we treat aged black backing panels with respect: no drilling or disturbing, and where a panel needs to go, it is removed and disposed of in line with the rules rather than broken out. It is a known, managed part of upgrading interwar boards and not a reason to leave a 1950s board in service.
Often, yes. The suburb that transmitted Australia's first television now watches everything over data, and a house relying on wifi through double-brick walls is fighting physics. Hard-wired data points to the rooms that matter, with the router where the cable enters rather than where the phone socket happened to be, fixes most of it. Double-brick interwar houses are exactly where cabled data earns its keep.
Attending your job is a chargeable callout. We confirm what it costs when you book, and the price for the work itself is agreed before we start, so there are no surprises on the invoice.
We are based in Castlecrag, five minutes away, and the streets around here are home ground.
See the full list of locations we service. If you are not sure whether the board needs doing, send us a photo of it and we will tell you straight.
Upfront pricing, with the price agreed before we start. If the board still has ceramic fuses, that is the place to begin, and it is a single day's work.
