Blown a service fuse? No power to the whole house?

First, check whether it is only you. Look down the street at night, or ask a neighbour. If the whole street is out it is a network outage and the distributor already knows. If it is only your property, and resetting your main switch and safety switches does nothing, you are most likely looking at a blown service fuse or a failed main supply connection.

Do not open the switchboard or the meter box cabinet and do not touch the service fuses. They sit on the network side of your point of connection and stay live even with your main switch off — that is what makes them lethal and why only a licensed electrician or the distributor may work on them. If you can smell burning, see smoke or scorching around the meter box, or hear buzzing or crackling, stay clear, keep everyone away from the board, and call 000 if there is any sign of fire.

Then call Glenn on 0418 576 387. We will tell you over the phone whether it is the distributor's scope, ours, or both — and we make the distributor booking for you rather than leaving you on hold.

Every property has a set of service fuses — sometimes called main fuses, service protection devices or the point-of-connection fuses. They sit before your meter, on the network side of the boundary between the distribution network and your installation. Everything after them — the meter tails, the switchboard, every circuit in the house — is yours. Everything before them belongs to the distributor.

That division matters when something fails, because it decides who can legally touch what. The distributor has to attend to isolate or replace on their side. We do everything on yours. On a typical job both need to happen in the same window, and the coordination is most of the work.

Victorian distributors have been writing to electrical contractors about this. Both United Energy and CitiPower have reported blown service fuses climbing by around 350% since EV chargers and home battery systems started appearing on suburban streets in volume. It is not a coincidence and it is not bad luck — it is arithmetic.

Service fuses were sized decades ago for a diversified household load: a kettle here, an oven there, nothing running flat out for long. An EV charger changes that completely. A 7kW single-phase charger pulls 32 amps continuously, for six or seven hours, most nights. Add a home battery cycling in and out, a heat pump hot water system, ducted reverse-cycle air conditioning and an induction cooktop, and the peak load on a 1980s connection can be double or triple what it was designed to carry.

A fuse element does not fail the first night. It heats, cools, heats, cools — thousands of cycles — and the metal fatigues. Months later it lets go, usually at peak demand on a 40-degree evening when the air conditioner, the oven and the car are all drawing at once. By then the fuse carrier, the meter tails and sometimes the switchboard itself have been running hot for a long time too.

We start by working out what actually failed, because a blown service fuse is a symptom. We book the distributor — United Energy, CitiPower, AusNet Services, Powercor or Jemena depending on your street — to attend and isolate or replace on their side, and we meet them on site so both halves of the job happen in one visit instead of two.

On our side we check and replace the meter tails, test the main neutral and earthing, inspect the board for heat damage, and where the board is the underlying problem we replace it with one sized for what you are actually running. Then we do a load assessment so the same fuse does not blow again next summer, and issue a Certificate of Electrical Safety registered with Energy Safe Victoria.

Where it will be an overnight wait for the distributor, ask us about a temporary supply for the essentials — fridge, freezer, medical equipment. It is not always possible, but it often is.

Your distributor is the company that owns the poles, wires and the service fuse — not your retailer. The name is printed on your electricity bill. Across our service area you will be with one of these:

United Energy — 132 099. CitiPower — 13 12 80. AusNet Services — 13 17 99. Powercor — 13 24 12. Jemena — 131 626. All are 24 hours.

Call them if there is any immediate danger — fallen wires, smoke, fire. For everything else, call us first: we make the same booking, we know what they need to hear to prioritise it, and we are there when they arrive so your power comes back on the same visit.

These failures almost always announce themselves first. A meter box or switchboard cabinet that is warm to the touch. Discolouration, browning or scorch marks around the fuse carriers or the main switch. Buzzing, humming or crackling from the board. Lights dipping when the air conditioner or oven starts. Nuisance tripping that has quietly got worse over a year. A burnt-plastic smell near the meter box.

Any of those means the connection is running hot. A thermal imaging scan of the board takes minutes and shows exactly where the heat is — far cheaper than a Friday-night emergency with a distributor on the clock and a family without power for two days.

This is the part most people skip. A charger that is perfectly compliant on its own circuit can still be the load that finishes off a tired service fuse, and the first anyone knows about it is a dark house. Before we quote an EV charger or a battery install we measure what the property is actually drawing, work out the new peak with the charger on it, and check the board, the tails and the service fuse rating against it.

Sometimes the answer is load management — the charger throttles itself when the oven and the air conditioner are running, and nothing else needs to change. Sometimes it is a board upgrade. Occasionally it is a supply upgrade with the distributor. Knowing which before you buy is the whole point.