A Board Can Look Fine and Still Be Failing
Electrical connections don't usually fail suddenly. They loosen, corrode, or work slightly free over years of thermal cycling. Resistance creeps up, and resistance under load makes heat. By the time there's a smell, discoloured plastic or a nuisance trip, the damage has already been happening for a long time.
A thermal camera makes that visible while it's still just heat. We scan the board live, under its normal load, and compare components against each other and against ambient. A connection running significantly hotter than its neighbours is telling you something, and it's telling you early enough to do something about it cheaply.
What Shows Up
- Loose or corroded terminations heating under load
- Overloaded circuits running consistently hot
- Failing breakers and RCDs that haven't tripped yet
- Unbalanced phases on three-phase boards
- Undersized or damaged cabling at the connection point
- Deteriorating busbar and link connections
No outage required. The board has to be live and loaded for the scan to mean anything, so there's no shutdown, no disruption, and no need to close a site or empty a building.
Where It's Worth Doing
Strata Common Property
Multi-tenancy meter boards and common area boards, where a failure affects every lot and the repair bill lands on the whole scheme.
Commercial Premises
Shops, offices and workshops where an unplanned outage means lost trading, spoiled stock or idle staff.
Older Boards
Boards that have been added to over the years, where connections have been disturbed repeatedly and loads have grown.
After Added Load
After a fit-out, new equipment, air conditioning or an EV charger. Anywhere demand has gone up since the board was built.
Routine Maintenance
Annual scans as part of a planned maintenance schedule, giving you a record over time rather than a single snapshot.
Domestic Boards
Homes with recurring nuisance tripping, a board that's warm to the touch, or an owner who simply wants it checked properly.
What You Get
- Thermal and standard images of the board side by side, so you can see the hot spot and where it physically sits.
- Recorded temperatures for the components of interest, and the ambient they're measured against.
- A plain-English explanation of what was found and how urgent it is, written so a strata committee or building manager can follow it.
- A recommendation and a price to rectify anything that needs attention, so you're not left chasing another trade.
Why It Pays for Itself
A loose termination found on a scan is usually a short job to fix. The same connection left alone can take out a breaker, damage the cable and the busbar, and in a multi-tenancy board bring down more than one supply. The difference between the two outcomes is often just knowing about it early.
M Tech Electrical holds Electrical Contractor Licence EC 14977 and carries full insurance. Because we're a licensed contractor and not just an inspection service, anything found can be rectified to AS/NZS 3000 with a certificate issued on completion.
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