What electrical hazards hide in a post-war home in Altona or Laverton?

The Hobsons Bay Planning Scheme describes post-war industrial and residential growth as transforming Altona and Laverton, and Altona still has special character areas set aside to keep intact post-war brick and weatherboard homes with established gardens. In West Newport, the Housing Commission built a whole estate between 1945 and 1960. The result is a lot of local homes whose electrical bones are 60 to 80 years old.

That isn't automatically a problem. Plenty of these houses were rewired or had their boards replaced along the way. But many were added to in stages: a back room in the 1970s, a carport light, a split system, a kitchen renovation, each tapping into what was already there. Behind the walls you usually find a mix of eras, and the oldest part limits the rest.

The same issues turn up again and again in homes of this age. Some are visible from the meter box; others only show when a fitting comes off or the wiring is tested.

Energy Safe Victoria's tell-tale signs of faulty wiring include old switchboards, particularly those without a safety switch, old or broken switches and power points, flickering lights and sparks from switchboards, switches or points. It advises owners of houses over 30 years old to have their wiring checked by a licensed electrician.

Open the meter box and look, without touching anything. Rewireable fuses sit in ceramic holders that pull out. Circuit breakers are switches in a row. A safety switch has a test button and '30mA' printed on it. Fuses and no test button usually means no safety switch protection. Energy Safe Victoria says a safety switch is now compulsory on new residential installations, and these boards predate that by decades.

Treat the panel the board is mounted on as possible asbestos. WorkSafe Victoria lists switchboards and their backing boards as a typical location for asbestos-containing materials in buildings built or renovated before the late 1980s, and its examples include ceramic fuses and pitch-based boards. Don't drill, screw into, sand or break the panel.

A replacement main switchboard needs safety switches on all final sub-circuits, and Energy Safe Victoria says the power can't go back on until a licensed electrical inspector has inspected the work.

Cable in the roof of a brick or weatherboard house cooks every summer and cools every winter. After 60-odd summers, rubber insulation can be hard and crumbly, and even early plastic cable can be brittle where it sat beside old halogen downlights or under a hot roof. Testing shows how well insulation is holding up, but not how brittle a cable is where nobody has disturbed it, which is why renovations often uncover more.

Unlicensed additions are the other common thread. Decades of handy owners have added points, moved switches and wired sheds, sometimes neatly and sometimes with indoor cable buried in the garden or joints taped up inside walls. They're hard to spot without opening things up, and they're where many faults begin.

Energy Safe Victoria says that when buying a home built before the 1980s, it is imperative to have the wiring checked by a licensed electrical inspector or registered electrical contractor before moving in. If you've already moved in, a safety check is still the right first step. It gives you a written picture of the board, the circuits and any faults, so you can decide what's urgent and what can wait.

A sensible order for most post-war homes is safety switch protection first, then anything found overheating or damaged, then the circuits that test poorly. Rewiring room by room can line up with renovations, and an old board is usually best dealt with before you add air conditioning, an induction cooktop or an EV charger. Our guide to old house wiring types shows what each generation of cable looks like.