Switchboards

It's a sad fact that over 1000 Australian homes a year are damaged or destroyed due to Electrical Fires. In addition, every year, over 40 Australians die from electrocution and over 10,000 are injured by electric shock.
Many of these accidents could have been prevented if there switchboards hade been upgraded to current Australian Standards.

Australian Standard AS3000:2007  includes updated safety requirements for new Australian homes.

Read on to find out how to improve the safety in your home....

Switchboards of ALL NEW homes and commercial buildings are REQUIRED to be fitted with Safety Switches known as Residual Current Devices (RCD) to all circuits that have light fittings or power points. These Safety switches are hard wired into your switchboard in combination with a Circuit Breaker to provide two levels of safety.

The first element of safety is that the RCD (Safety Switch) is designed to turn off the electricity supply within 40 milliseconds, That is 40/1000th of a second, if there is more than a predefined level of power flowing to earth. These type of current flows can be caused by things like faults in equipment, or accidental contact with live parts of equipment. For example, an RCD can prevent electrocution death by sticking metal objects into power points or light fittings etc..

The second level of protection is in the Circuit Breaker part of the device. As they are hard wired they can not be accidentally changed with an incorrectly rated fuse. The role of the Circuit Breaker is to limit the current in the cable inside your home. If too high a current is allowed to flow in a cable it can over heat and catch fire.

RCDs (safety switches) can be purchased as a separate unit and used in conjunction with a separate circuit breaker or in a RCD/CB (safety switch/circuit breaker) combination unit.

Australian Authorities think these devices are important enough that they are mandatory in ALL new homes and commercial buildings....... and so should you!