Switchboards form the core of every electrical installation across Australia, and ensuring they comply with regulatory standards saves money and even lives.
An arc flash is not a typical electrical fault – it is a violent release of energy. When an arc flash occurs, there is no warning and almost no time to respond. Current discharges through ionised air, creating a plasma arc that releases extreme heat, pressure and energy in milliseconds, faster than conventional protection can react.
A properly maintained switchboard is the first line of defence against overcurrent, earth faults and arc events, and when it fails to perform that role, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Switchboards form the core of every electrical installation across Australia. They are present in any commercial or residential building, as well as data centres, hospitals and other forms of vital infrastructure, making ensuring they’re operating safely and according to regulatory standards more than a compliance obligation.
“We’ve all seen the videos of what an arc flash can do under a fault event: it can kill someone,” said Adam Muntz, the Queensland Sales Manager for electrical distribution and service provider IPD.
“That’s what the standards that exist are there for. It’s not only to protect equipment and cost to business. It’s primarily for the safety of the people who work with them.”
Proper switchboard maintenance and safety, he said, is a vital and even life-saving part of electrical equipment operations, which helps to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity.
Poor design, poor maintenance
Australia’s existing switchboard infrastructure is ageing, increasingly overloaded and sometimes non-compliant, creating a growing gap between the safety of installed systems and the legal, technical and physical demands being placed on them.
“When we look at this ageing infrastructure, we see different types of faults – overload, short circuits, arc flashes in the support system – and that can affect efficiency or destroy the switchboard system completely.”
Justin Senkevics, IPD’s NSW and ACT Sales Manager, has encountered a wide variety of switchboards that, for one reason or another, are not up to standard.
Poor design as well as poor maintenance and operation can increase the risk. Senkevics has encountered switchboards built with too many components crammed into too small an area, and others with circuit breakers that had been disabled to deal with hot weather.
“I’ve seen an old shopping centre with a high current and complex switchboard system that had no barriers,” he said.
“There’s a high current circuit breaker inside with nothing covering it, which is very dangerous to work on. Then, around these switchboards, you might get vermin or dust, which can cause arcing events.”
When the system shorts, the electric current increases exponentially in the space of milliseconds, melting the metal in the circuit breaker and emitting gas.
“That’s the short-circuit condition that would render the circuit breaker a miniature explosive device,” said Muntz.
“The standards are there to ensure that the design, the structure and the integrity of the board can withstand that event.”
Following the road rules
Engineers designing a switchboard, along with the end client and the contractor supporting the solution, should be looking at delivering fully verified systems that perform safely under real operating and fault conditions.
AS 3000 is the road rules that governs how electrical installations must be set up and operated. AS/NZS 61439 is the vehicle safety standard that defines how the switchboard itself must be designed, tested and verified before it’s put into service.
“We follow the AS/NZS 3000 electrical installation rules, which ensures the system is safe for personnel as well as equipment. They’re the equivalent of the road rules when you’re driving a car,” Zaidi said.
“But there is also a standard especially related to switchboard systems called AS/NZS 61439, which defines how a switchboard system should be designed and verified.” You can follow the road rules perfectly, but if the vehicle hasn’t been built to the right safety standard, the risk remains.
AS/NZS 61439 fundamentally changed the way switchboard compliance is structured and evidenced. The standard separates design verification from the responsibility of the original equipment manufacturer to assembly verification, which falls to the switchboard builder. This division creates a clear, documented chain of accountability that didn’t exist under previous requirements, giving specifiers, asset owners and engineers a more reliable basis for assessing whether a switchboard genuinely meets its safety and performance obligations.
Consultants and engineers should be looking for compliant products that have a proven history and a good track record in the market.
“In the AS/NZS 61439 standard, there’s a checklist of 13 points that ensures that the board is compliant for that particular standard,” Zaidi said.
“Consultants should be aware that they need to ask end users and their custom board builders or assemblers for that particular documentation, which ensures safety has been considered as a main concern.”
The cost of not acting
Operators concerned about the safety of their switchboards should consider electrical nuances that can indicate a problem: heat, humming or equipment failing, for instance.
“There are devices that can be installed inside a switchboard, like arc flash protection relays or surge arrestors, that play a part in switchboard safety as well,” Zaidi said.
“Arc fault containment is about containing the fault, but there is also equipment that can detect and extinguish an arc fault”
Risk mitigation efforts such as these can quickly pay for themselves, considering the cost in downtime to a business, which for some operators, can reach millions of dollars. The cost of a switchboard upgrade is a fraction of the cost of a fire, an insurance claim denial, or a workplace health and safety investigation.
“And there’s no cost that can be put on a human life,” Senkevics said.
For more information on switchboard compliance solutions, visit the IPD website.
