Advice · Safety
Working from home: ten minutes of electrical checks
Under Queensland work health and safety law your spare room counts as a workplace, which surprises most people working in one. It also means the electrical checks are a shared responsibility, not yours alone.
The bit nobody mentions when you start
Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, a workplace is wherever work is carried out for a business, which includes the spare room you are working in. So the room is in scope, and identifying and reducing the risks is a shared job, not something you are quietly left with. What the employer owes is what is reasonably practicable for them, and how much control they have over somebody else's house is part of that. Which makes this a conversation, not a demand.
It cuts both ways. If you are the employer, the obligation is yours as well. If you are the employee, asking for something to be checked is a reasonable thing to do, and you should.
The safety switch test
Before you start working from home, find out whether the house has a safety switch and whether it works.
Look for a test button on the switchboard, press it, confirm the switch trips, reset it. Then do the same roughly every three months. If there is no test button on the board, the house has no safety switch. That is a phone call to an electrician, not something to work around.
Look at the equipment
Queensland's safety regulators publish guidance for home offices, and the electrical part of it comes down to a visual inspection anyone can do in ten minutes.
- Check every cord for cuts, nicks and any exposed conductor
- Check equipment for visible damage: cracked covers, discolouration from overheating
- Anything damaged gets thrown out or repaired by someone licensed to repair it. Do not repair it yourself
- Position leads and power boards where furniture, chairs and foot traffic will not damage them
- Keep paper and other items away from the air vents on equipment, and do not cover power boards or power supplies
- Do not stack equipment that is on charge, such as a phone sitting on a laptop
- Do not let children play with electrical cords, and keep cords from dangling within a child's reach
The power board problem
The single most common fault in a home office is a power board carrying more than it should, often with a second board plugged into it.
A computer, two screens and a charger or two are a light load and generally fine. A heater is not, and neither are two. Anything that makes heat wants its own power point, not a share of a board.
If you are regularly running out of power points, that is the actual problem, and adding another board is treating the symptom. A couple of extra points near the desk is a short job and removes the whole question.
If you are the employer
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland publishes a working from home checklist. Sending it out beats assuming, and it is quick. Check you have the current version: the older ones still say telecommuting.
For a business with staff working from home regularly, having their equipment tested and tagged is the straightforward version of the same obligation, and it produces a record.
Rewritten from “Working from Home in Far North Queensland”, published on the BH Electrics blog in April 2020. The original was written in the first weeks of the pandemic; the safety guidance outlasted the circumstances and is what remains here.
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Straight answers
Questions people ask about this
Is a home office covered by work health and safety laws?
Yes. The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 defines a workplace as anywhere work is carried out for a business, which takes in a home office. That makes identifying and reducing the risks a shared responsibility, not something the employee carries alone, with the employer's duty measured by what is reasonably practicable and by how much control they realistically have over someone else's home. In practice it means the employer should be asking about the electrical safety of the setup, and the employee is entitled to raise it.
What electrical checks should I do in a home office?
Test the safety switch before you start and then every three months. Inspect every cord for cuts, nicks or exposed conductors, and check equipment for cracked covers or discolouration from heat. Throw out or professionally repair anything damaged. Keep leads clear of chairs and foot traffic, keep paper away from air vents, do not cover power boards, and do not stack equipment that is charging.
Is it safe to plug a heater into a power board?
No. Heaters and anything else that makes heat should go straight into a power point of their own, not into a power board shared with other equipment, and never into a board plugged into another board. If you are forever short of power points, the answer is more power points, not more boards. It is a short job for an electrician.
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