A BH Electrics electrician on a step ladder fitting a large paper pendant light in a renovated Port Douglas living room

Advice

Things worth knowing before you ring anyone

9 articles on the decisions that come up most: what is actually on your switchboard, what to sort out before the linings go on, and what a commercial refurbishment needs from an electrician before it needs a builder.

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Safety

01 Safety switch or circuit breaker? They do completely different jobs Ceramic fuses, plug-in breakers, safety switches and combination devices explained. What protects the wiring, what protects you, and how to tell them apart. 02 Working from home: ten minutes of electrical checks Your spare room is a workplace under the Work Health and Safety Act. The safety switch test, the ten-minute equipment check, and what your employer owes you.

Storm season

01 Generator changeover switches, and which one your building needs A generator alone will not run your lights, fans or hot water. What a changeover switch does, manual against automatic, and how to choose before the season.

Commercial

01 Planning a commercial refurbishment? Ring the electrician before the builder What belongs in an electrical plan for a shop, restaurant or office refurbishment, why it comes first, and the questions to ask before you appoint anyone. 02 Car park ventilation: fans that run on demand, not all day Variable speed drives with carbon monoxide monitoring cut car park ventilation costs and extend plant life. How demand-driven control works for a body corp.

Renovation

01 Smart homes: what is worth wiring in, and what can wait Automated lighting, grouped switching and whole-house audio. What to decide while the walls are open, what can wait, and who is licensed to install what. 02 Renovating: the electrical decisions that have to happen before the linings go on The electrical choices that are cheap while the walls are open and expensive afterwards: switchboard, circuits, cabling, and what to over-cater for.

Lighting

01 What you actually save by getting rid of halogen downlights Halogen downlights get hot enough to scorch and draw five times the power of an LED. The real numbers on energy, on fire risk, and on the cooling bill. 02 Garden lighting: the last thing anybody plans and the first thing people notice How to light a tropical garden so you actually use it after dark: what to light, the safety and security case, and why the wiring still needs an electrician.

Real jobs

Advice is cheap. Here is the work

A wind farm on the Atherton Tablelands, recovery work across the Douglas Shire after Cyclone Jasper, and a pub that kept trading through its TAB bar build. Every one names the client, who we worked for and the year.

01 Mount Emerald Wind Farm Most of what BH does fits in a building. This one fits in a landscape. Our people were on Mount Emerald Wind Farm from the start of construction to the end of commissioning. 02 After Cyclone Jasper Cyclone Jasper flooded the Douglas Shire in December 2023 and took the power with it. BH Electrics spent the summer making properties safe and putting them back on. Then six businesses asked how to never be caught like that again. 03 Court House Hotel BH Electrics has been in and out of the Court House since 2017. A front bar refurbishment, a TAB bar built around a pub that kept trading, and in 2026 the switchboards the whole hotel runs on.

All 12 projects

Straight answers

About these articles

Who writes the advice on this site?

BH Electrics does. Everything here comes out of work we have actually done across the Douglas Shire and the Cairns northern beaches, and each article says at the foot of it what it was rewritten from. It is general advice about how electrical work is planned and specified, not a substitute for having your own building looked at.

Can I do any of this work myself?

Testing your own safety switch, inspecting cords for damage and counting how many downlights you have are all yours to do. Anything that involves the switchboard, the fixed wiring or a fitting is licensed electrical work in Queensland, and it is licensed because the failure mode is somebody dying. QLD Electrical Contractor Licence 82270.

Is there any advice here about solar or air conditioning?

No, because BH Electrics does neither, and that covers installing one, servicing an existing one and cleaning one. Air conditioners appear in these articles only as an electrical load, for example the cooling a generator may or may not be able to carry. The full position is on the services page.

How current is this advice?

Every article here is kept as a reference page rather than a dated post, and each is reviewed rather than left to age. Where a source quoted a price, a tariff or a supply threshold that would go stale, the figure has been replaced with the method, so the arithmetic still works whenever you read it. Regulatory references name the Act or the regulator so you can check them yourself.

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