Is There Asbestos in Old Switchboards? What to Expect

Byron Knight, Licensed Electrical Contractor

QLD Lic. 1511406 · 20+ years’ experience · Gold Coast & SEQ · Updated September 2026

Someone has opened your meter box — an electrician quoting a switchboard upgrade, a building inspector, maybe you — and behind the fuses there is a flat, dark panel that doesn’t look like anything sold today. The word gets said, and the job stops being about power points.

Here is the part worth knowing before you spend a weekend worrying about it: the Queensland Government’s own advice on asbestos in good condition is to leave it alone. What changes that is not the asbestos itself. It’s the moment work needs to happen on the board in front of it. This guide covers what the material is, how to recognise it without touching it, and what actually happens next — including the part most pages skip, which is that your electrician almost certainly isn’t the person who removes it.

What the asbestos is, and where it sits

In an older switchboard or meter panel, the asbestos isn’t in the wiring. It’s the board itself — the flat sheet everything is mounted on.

The Queensland Government’s asbestos service is direct about why it’s there: “Non-friable asbestos containing materials (ACM) were commonly used as an electrical insulator on meter boards and panels in general, and as bases to the busbars, spark arresters, and flash guards.” Asbestos doesn’t conduct and doesn’t burn, which in the 1950s made it an obvious material to bolt live gear onto.

The same page notes a second, separate possibility: “Timber meter boxes installed prior to 1990 can also be lined with asbestos-cement sheeting (fibro).” So there can be two different asbestos products in the same meter box — the backing panel, and the box lining — and they’re not the same material.

Australia banned asbestos and all products containing it on 31 December 2003, and the general rule the same page gives homeowners is that a home built before 1990 is likely to contain some asbestos materials. Electrical backing boards stopped earlier than the ban — NSW’s product register puts their manufacture at pre-1987.

How to recognise it without touching anything

There are two identification routes, and you can do both from a metre away with a torch.

The look and the smell. The NSW asbestos product register describes these boards precisely: “Electrical backing boards are usually dark brown or black with a stiff and rough fibrous or wood-like surface. They may smell like tar.” That tar note is the giveaway — these are bituminous boards, and they don’t look like modern plastic or painted steel panels.

The brand stamp. Four product names come up again and again, and both the Queensland and NSW government registers list the same set: Zelemite, Lebah, Ausbestos and Miscolite. NSW notes they “may be stamped on the back” of the board — which means an electrician may see it during work, and you usually won’t.

Why this is not an emergency

Plenty of pages on this topic are written by businesses that sell removal, and they read like it. The regulator is calmer. The Queensland Government’s FAQ for homeowners says it in one line: “You don’t need to remove asbestos. If materials containing asbestos are in good condition (i.e. undamaged, undisturbed), the safest option is to leave them alone. The materials are not dangerous if undisturbed and sealed.”

The mechanism behind that is straightforward. Asbestos causes harm when fibres become airborne and are breathed in. A bonded, non-friable board with the fibres locked into a bituminous matrix, sitting undisturbed inside a closed meter box, isn’t releasing them. Drilling it, cutting it, snapping it or pulling it off the wall is what changes the picture — which is why the risk is tied to work, not to presence.

So a board that’s intact, in a box that closes, on a house nobody is renovating, is a thing to know about and leave be. If the board is cracked, crumbling, water-damaged or already broken, that’s a different conversation and worth acting on rather than sitting with.

The part almost every page misses: the fuses

Nearly everything written about asbestos switchboards describes the board as non-friable, then stops. That’s true of the board, and it is not the whole story.

The NSW asbestos product register records something more specific about these panels: “The fuse on the lower left side also contains friable asbestos inside the fuse carrier,” and adds that “The Federal fuses may also contain friable asbestos.”

That distinction is not academic, because friable and non-friable asbestos are regulated completely differently. A board and the fuses mounted on it can fall into two different categories, and the friable category is the stricter one — which matters enormously once you get to the question of who is legally allowed to touch it.

What this does to a switchboard upgrade

For most people this question never arises on its own. It arises because they wanted something else: a switchboard upgrade, safety switches added, solar, an EV charger, an air conditioner, or a failed board replaced after a fault.

All of those need the existing board removed or heavily worked on. That is the disturbance. So the asbestos stops being a background fact and becomes the first item on the schedule.

Sequencing is the whole problem, and it’s why finding out early is worth real money:

1. Identify before you book. If a suspect board is spotted at quoting stage, the job can be planned as one coordinated piece of work rather than a job that stops halfway.
2. Confirm by sampling, not by argument. Laboratory analysis settles it. Guessing either way costs more than testing does.
3. The asbestos work comes first. The panel has to be dealt with under the correct controls before new gear can be mounted where it used to be.
4. Then the electrical work. New board, new protective devices, testing, and the electrical certificate that goes with it.

The version nobody enjoys is the unplanned one: the board is opened mid-job, the panel is suspect, and the work has to stop. Now there’s a house that may be on a temporary arrangement or without power to part of the circuits, a second trade to engage, a lab turnaround to wait on, and a return visit to schedule. Nothing about that is unsafe if handled properly — it’s just slower and more expensive than finding out a fortnight earlier during a switchboard inspection.

If you’re buying an older place, this is exactly the sort of thing worth surfacing before settlement rather than after, alongside the other things a pre-purchase electrical inspection is looking for.

Who is legally allowed to remove it in Queensland

This is where most of the advice online is either vague or from the wrong state. Queensland’s rules are set out by WorkSafe Queensland, and they turn on two things: whether the material is friable, and how much of it there is.

A switchboard backing panel is a small piece of material, so on area alone it sits well under the 10m² line. Two things complicate that comfortable conclusion. The first is the fuse carriers above — if friable asbestos is present, area stops mattering, because there is no unlicensed pathway for friable material at any quantity. The second is that “no licence required” is not the same as “no rules”: WorkSafe QLD ties the unlicensed pathway to Part 8.7 of the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011, and the How to safely remove asbestos Code of Practice 2021 sets out how that work is done.

Your electrician probably doesn’t remove asbestos — including us

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of pages on this topic are written to imply otherwise.

An electrical contractor licence and an asbestos removal licence are two different things issued by two different regulators for two different kinds of work. Most electricians hold the first and not the second. Knight Electrical Solutions does not remove asbestos. If we find a suspect board on your job, what we can do is tell you what we’re looking at, explain what it means for the work you wanted done, and not disturb it.

What that means practically is that an asbestos switchboard is a two-trade job: someone appropriately licensed deals with the asbestos, and a licensed electrical contractor does the electrical work. Anyone telling you a single electrical licence covers both halves is describing something other than what the licensing actually says.

The upside of knowing this early is that it’s a coordination problem rather than a crisis. Two trades, in the right order, on a planned date beats one trade discovering it with your switchboard open on a Friday afternoon.

We don’t publish a figure for what this adds, because we don’t quote on anything we haven’t inspected — and on this topic in particular the variables are real: whether the material is confirmed by testing, whether anything friable is involved, the condition of the panel, access to the meter box, and whether the electrical work is a straight replacement or a larger upgrade. The honest version is that it’s quoted after it’s looked at, not before.

On the Gold Coast, specifically

Two things make this a live question here rather than a theoretical one.

The first is when the place was built. Large parts of the established housing stock in Southport, Labrador and the older streets of Burleigh Heads went up well inside the window when these boards were standard. Many have had the fuses updated and the board itself never touched, which is precisely the configuration where the panel is still there behind newer-looking gear.

The second is the climate. Meter boxes on this coast take weather, and salt air is unkind to switchboards — doors that no longer close, rusted-out hinges, moisture getting in. Condition is what separates “leave it alone” from “this needs attention”, and a box that stopped keeping the weather out years ago is more likely to sit on the wrong side of that line. If your meter box door doesn’t shut properly, that’s worth looking at for several reasons at once.

And because the Gold Coast turns over property at pace, plenty of people meet their switchboard for the first time during a pre-settlement inspection. Better then than mid-renovation.