How to choose an electrician in Melbourne.

Most people choose an electrician the way they choose a plumber — a mate's recommendation, a Google search, whoever answers the phone. That's not a bad start, but electrical work is one of the few trades where the wrong choice can sit hidden inside your walls for years before it hurts someone or burns the house down.

Here's how I'd size up an electrician if I weren't one myself.

Check the licence — it takes five minutes

In Victoria, anyone carrying out electrical work for payment must hold a licence issued by Energy Safe Victoria (ESV). There are different licence types — an A-grade electrician is the full, unrestricted licence, and that's who you want for general work in your home.

On top of the individual licence, the business doing the work must be a Registered Electrical Contractor (REC). The REC number should be on the quote, the invoice, the website and usually the side of the van. Ours is REC 22849. If you can't find one, ask. If they can't produce one, walk away — contracting electrical work without an REC registration is illegal in Victoria, full stop.

You can verify both on ESV's public register. Five minutes online beats years of wondering whether the wiring behind the plaster is legal.

Ask about the certificate

Every electrical installation job in Victoria — not just the big ones — must come with a Certificate of Electrical Safety (COES), lodged with ESV. It's the paper trail that says the work was done by a licensed person and meets AS/NZS 3000, the Wiring Rules.

Two things matter here. First, if an electrician finishes a job and there's no certificate, the work legally isn't finished. Second, that certificate is what your insurer will ask for after a fire. No COES means the insurer has an easy reason to knock back a claim.

Some work — switchboards, consumer mains, new circuits — is classed as prescribed work and gets an extra layer of scrutiny. A legitimate electrician won't blink when you ask about certification. If you get a blank look or a "don't worry about that," worry about that.

The same logic applies to warranties. A licensed contractor who certifies their work stands behind it — if a breaker they installed fails in a year, they come back. That obligation evaporates the moment the work was done off the books.

Insurance isn't optional

Ask whether they hold public liability insurance, and for how much. Any professional outfit carries it. If a drill goes through a water pipe or a fault takes out your fridge and washing machine, insurance is the difference between an awkward phone call and a tribunal hearing.

The quote tells you a lot

A proper quote for anything beyond a power point replacement should be written and itemised — what's being supplied, what's being installed, what's excluded. Watch for:

• A price over the phone for work they haven't seen. Nobody can quote a switchboard upgrade without seeing the board, the cable routes and the earthing. A sight-unseen price is a guess that becomes a variation.
• Cash-only discounts. This one's simple: no invoice, no COES, no warranty, no comebacks. The discount is you taking on all the risk.
• Vague scope. "Fix wiring" is not a scope. "Replace consumer mains, install 12-way board with RCBO protection on all circuits, issue COES" is.

The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest job. What you're buying is the bits you can't see — correctly sized cable, tight terminations, tested earthing — and those cost the same whoever does them properly.

Local knowledge counts

Melbourne's eastern suburbs have their own quirks. There's a lot of 1960s–80s brick veneer through Doncaster, Templestowe and Donvale — some of it still running original wiring or early aluminium cable. The Federation and Edwardian homes in Kew and Surrey Hills have their own surprises: ancient conduit, ceramic fuses, decades of piecemeal additions. And anything involving the service line, metering or supply capacity goes through AusNet Services, the distributor for the east — an electrician who works here knows that process and what AusNet will and won't allow.

An electrician from across town can do the work, but one who works the area every week has seen your exact house before — often literally, in the next street.

Word of mouth still beats everything else here. Ask the neighbours — in an established street there's a fair chance the electrician who rewired number 14 knows exactly what's behind your walls too. Online reviews help, but read the three-star ones: that's where you learn how a business behaves when something goes wrong, which tells you more than fifty five-star ratings.

Questions worth asking

Before you book, ask:

1. Are you a Registered Electrical Contractor, and what's your REC number?
2. Will I get a Certificate of Electrical Safety for this work?
3. Who's actually doing the work — you, your A-grade, or an apprentice? (Apprentices are fine and normal, but they work under supervision, and you deserve to know.)
4. Is the quote fixed, and what would make it change?
5. Do you hold public liability insurance?

The answers matter less than the way they're answered. A good electrician fires these back without hesitation because they're asked every week.

What the good ones do on site

You can tell a lot in the first half hour. The electrician you want turns up when they said they would (or rings to say they're running late), drops a sheet before they start cutting into anything, and talks you through what they're about to do in plain language. They test before and after — not just "she's working now" but actual instrument readings on earthing and insulation where the job calls for it.

When they finish, they clean up, label anything new at the switchboard, and hand you the paperwork without being chased for it. If your board has been touched, the new circuits are labelled so the next electrician — or you, at 11pm with a tripped breaker — can work out what's what.

None of this is premium service. It's baseline professional behaviour, and it's exactly what the cowboys skip.

How many quotes to get

For a small job — a few power points, a fan, a light fitting — one quote from an electrician you trust is fine. For anything over a few thousand dollars, get two or three. You're not hunting for the lowest number; you're looking for the quote that shows the electrician understood the job. The one that lists the cable sizes, the board layout and the exclusions beats the one that's fifty bucks cheaper and says "rewire, as discussed".

If the quotes are wildly different, ask each of them why. Sometimes the expensive one has priced in the consumer mains the others forgot. Sometimes the cheap one has no intention of doing them.

Red flags

• No REC number anywhere
• Won't put the quote in writing
• Pushes for cash
• Can't say who'll turn up on the day
• Quotes big jobs without a site visit
• Badmouths the regulator, certificates or "all that paperwork" — the paperwork is what protects you

The short of it

Check the REC number, expect a certificate, get it in writing, and favour the electrician who answers the phone afterwards. Melbourne has plenty of good sparkies. The checks above take ten minutes and filter out nearly all of the bad ones.

Need something looked at? Send us an enquiry and we'll talk through the job — and if it's a safety inspection you're after, we can usually tell you over the phone whether it's worth a visit.