Project · Residential
Bangalow: a pavilion house, everything electrical out and back in
Bangalow sits high above Four Mile Beach with an uninterrupted view along the coast. The pavilion bones stayed. Every electrical service in the building came out.
The job
- Client
- Bangalow
- Where
- Port Douglas
- Sector
- Residential
- Builder
- Mane Contracting Group
- Year
- 2018
A complete strip-out is a different job from a rewire
Working with local builder Mane Contracting Group, BH Electrics removed all existing electrical services from the property and started again. Not a partial rewire, not new circuits alongside old ones: everything out.
It is the right call more often than owners expect in a house of this vintage on this coast. Salt air, decades of alterations and the accumulated habits of successive trades leave a lot of older Port Douglas houses with wiring that is serviceable in isolation and incoherent as a whole. Once a refurbishment goes past a certain point, a clean start costs less than mapping what is there and is the only way to get a switchboard that reflects the house you end up with.
Understatement, specified
The owner's brief was simple beauty, and that is harder electrically than it sounds. Everything has to work faultlessly and almost nothing is allowed to show.
Clipsal Iconic carried the switching, programmable where it needed to be. Haiku fans went in for their classic lines as much as for the air they move. Both choices follow the same logic: the best result is the one a guest never notices.
In Brad’s words, the house ended up “a perfect blend of top end performance and classic understatement”.
Following a design, alongside other trades
The work was done to a design, closely coordinated with the builder and the other trades on site. On a refurbishment at this level that coordination is most of the job. Chases get closed up, linings go on and joinery lands in an order that gives an electrician exactly one window for each part of the rough-in. Missing one is expensive for everybody on site, not just for the electrician who missed it.
Bangalow is let out as a holiday house, so the finish is on show to guests rather than to an owner alone.
The trades involved
What this job drew on
Straight answers
Questions this job answers
Is it better to rewire a house completely or add to the existing wiring?
It depends on how much of the house the refurbishment touches. Adding circuits is sensible for a contained job. Once a renovation reaches most of the rooms, a full strip-out is usually cheaper than tracing, testing and documenting decades of alterations, and it is the only way to finish with a switchboard that matches the house. At Bangalow every existing electrical service was removed and the building started again from the supply.
What does programmable switching actually give you in a house?
Grouped control, mostly. One press setting a whole area rather than a wall of switches, scenes for the times of day a house is actually used, and the ability to change what a switch does later without rewiring it. It is worth doing at refurbishment, when the cabling is open, and awkward to retrofit afterwards. It is not the same thing as a full home automation system and does not need one.
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