What Canberra Homeowners Ask Electricians For: Two Years of Quote Requests

Every quote request that comes through our website tells us something about Canberra homes: what is wearing out, what people are adding, and when they decide to act. We looked at two years of them, from July 2024 to October 2026, to see what Canberra and Queanbeyan homeowners actually ask an electrician for.

The short answer: switchboards and lighting, by a wide margin. But the detail is more interesting. What people need depends heavily on when their suburb was built, and requests rise and fall with the seasons.

How we did this

We took every request sent through the quote forms on our website between July 2024 and early October 2026. We removed spam, test entries and requests without a suburb, which left 604 genuine enquiries. Each one has the suburb the person entered and the type of job they chose from the form.

We grouped suburbs into Canberra’s districts (Tuggeranong, Belconnen, Gungahlin and so on, plus the Queanbeyan region in NSW) and counted requests by job type, district and season. We did not include phone calls, and a request is not the same as a completed job. Personal details were never part of the analysis.

Switchboards and lighting lead everywhere

Across all of Canberra, the jobs people asked us to quote were:

Switchboard requests cover more than just a new board. They include adding safety switches, extra power points, outdoor power and fixing circuits that keep tripping. Much of this comes from homes built before modern wiring rules, where an old fuse board is struggling with today’s appliances. We cover the warning signs in our guide to ceramic fuses and old fuse boxes.

Lighting is the second big category, mostly replacing halogen downlights and old fittings with LEDs. Our LED downlight guide explains what that involves.

Where the requests come from

Of the 530 requests from a suburb we could place in a district, a third (34%) came from Tuggeranong. Gungahlin (14%) and Belconnen (14%) were next, followed by the Queanbeyan region (9%), the Inner North (8%), Woden (7%), the Inner South (6%), Weston Creek (5%) and the Molonglo Valley (3%).

Part of that is simply where we are: we are based in Calwell, so south side homeowners find us first. But Tuggeranong also has a lot of homes from the 1970s and 80s, and those are exactly the houses that now need switchboard and lighting work. You can read more on our Tuggeranong page.

The suburbs we heard from most were Calwell, Kambah, Theodore, Jerrabomberra and Queanbeyan.

Each district needs something different

The overall picture hides some clear local patterns:

• Woden had the highest share of switchboard requests of any district, at 36%. Many Woden suburbs were built in the 1960s and early 70s, and their original boards are now well past their best.
• Weston Creek and Belconnen split almost evenly between switchboards and lighting. In Weston Creek, lighting made up 31% of requests.
• Belconnen and the Inner South asked for data cabling and security noticeably more than other areas, with data at 11% and 13% of requests.
• The Queanbeyan region was the only area where solar and batteries matched switchboards and lighting, each at 22%.
• The Molonglo Valley was the outlier. EV chargers were the single most requested job there, at 23% of requests, four times the Canberra-wide share.

The Molonglo result makes sense. It is Canberra’s newest district, and new ACT homes can no longer be connected to the gas network, so they are built all-electric. Owners there are not replacing old wiring. They are adding EV chargers, batteries and data points to homes that were built with the basics. See our Molonglo Valley page for more.

Requests follow the seasons

Looking at requests by season (using the 614 requests that named a job type) shows how much the weather drives demand:

• Fans peak in summer. Fans and exhaust made up 14% of summer requests but only 6% in winter. Most people think about a ceiling fan when the first hot nights arrive.
• Lighting peaks in winter. Lighting rose to 28% of winter requests, against 10% in summer. Shorter days make dim or failing lights hard to ignore.
• Solar and batteries peak in autumn, at 19% of requests, as people review their summer power bills and plan ahead of winter.
• Switchboards are steady all year, between 26% and 31% in every season. Old boards fail whenever they fail.

Spring was the busiest season overall, with 30% of the year’s requests.

What people write in their messages

Many requests include a note about the job. The words that came up most were power points, solar, fans, batteries, TV mounting, fuses, ovens and switchboards. Together they paint a picture of homes adding things (power, batteries, appliances) as much as fixing what is broken.

What this means for your home

A few practical takeaways from the data:

1. If your home was built before the 1990s, get the switchboard checked first. It is the most common job for a reason, and it often needs doing before solar, a battery, an EV charger or a new kitchen can be added safely. Our switchboard page explains what an upgrade involves.
2. Book seasonal jobs early. Fans and air conditioning circuits are easier to schedule in spring than in the first heatwave.
3. Plan electrification as one job. If you want a charger, a battery and an induction cooktop, it is cheaper and neater to plan the switchboard and circuits once than to add them one at a time.

Limits of this data

This study only covers requests made through our website, so it reflects people who found us online and chose to fill in a form. Phone enquiries are not included, district totals are influenced by where our business is based, and a quote request does not always become a job. Small districts like the Molonglo Valley have fewer requests, so their percentages move more with each enquiry. We will update this study as more data comes in.