Rental Property

Rental property maintenance

If you own or are planning to invest in a rental property, we are well experienced in this area.

We look after several of our clients rental properties, including the properties of several overseas clients.

Here are some electrical installation peace of mind tips to keep maintenance costs down.

Switch Boards

Replace rewireable fuses for safety

If you own an older house built prior to 1990s which still use rewireable ceramic fuses we recommend that you have these replaced with mcbs (minature circuit breakers) especially on high load circuits such as stoves, hot water, and power outlet circuits.

Circuit protection

These devices are much more sensitive and react faster than fuse wire, virtually straight away, the moment their overload capacity is reached. This abillity is essential today, with the number of appiances in the home, the potential for high instantaneous overloads of electrical installations is relatively high, and therefore tends to pose more risk of installation damage and fire, as well as more serious damage to other  items on the same circuit or to the item causing the fault.

Human Protection

The old rewireable fuses are dangerous to the unwary

Because many of these old fuses have rounded edges and open live connections in their bases it is very easy for ones finger to slip in to the base of these and come into contact with the live terminals and receive a very nasty shock, or be electrocuted if one is so unfortunate. This is why the sale and use of these fuses in such circumstances is now banned. Allways turn off the power at the main switch should you ever need to change one of these fuses.

Overall installation safety

Earth leakage protection installation

For overall property and human safety we recommend the added installation of Earth leakage protection devices at the switch board which are connected in conjunction with existing individual circuit overload protection.

These devices monitor the overall insulation safety resistance levels and integrity of the electrical cables and fittings and limit leakage currents that can be life threatening by automatically disconnecting the power .
This is also advantageous in certain fault conditions where the fault current is in sufficent to cause the normal overload protection to work , but of a level that can cause the faulty device or cable to catch fire and cause damage that would otherwise be avoidable .