# Forum Home Renovation Electrical  Upgrading power requires neighbour to convert to underground

## OverInterview

I have a complicated electrical issue I am trying to find a solution around, would welcome any views!  
I live in a ~100 year old semi-detached house in Perth that is on a survey strata with the adjoining property. Our current electrical connection runs overhead from a street pole to our verandah via standard 63A single phase connection. At our verandah the Western Power cable connects to the original 6mm (32A) cable that runs through the concrete verandah before going into the double brick wall cavity and down to the switchboard at the front of the property. We rewired everything on the other side of the switchboard when we bought the property which included the installation of an electric oven and cooktop. As far as I can tell, the switchboard has a 63A circuit breaker.  
We now want to install ducted air-conditioning and our electrician notified us that we'd need to upgrade the 6mm cable as our current load (lights, power points, oven, cooktop) has already brought us up to the 6mm cables 32A limit. The electrician expected this to be fairly straight forward (it's only 3m of cable) however Western Power (the grid operator / maintainer) informed us that our connection does not meet current standards and that we would need to convert to underground if we want to make any changes to the connection. The reason we don't comply is that our neighbours supply also connects to and runs through our verandah!  
Now as we are on survery strata, this means that both us and our neighbours need to convert to underground and for that we need to get our neighbours permission. We have organised quotes for the work which will be around $13-15k to convert both properties. Unfortunately however, our neighbours have no need to upgrade their cable (they already have air-conditioning & gas oven & gas cooktop) so they have told us they are not willing to go ahead with the work as they can't see the value in it.  
One of the electricians that quoted for the work told us that he thought we should just go ahead and install the air-conditioning and see what happens as the older cables generally can take more than the current standards suggest. He said the worst that would happen is that the cable would burn out at the connection point at the front of the house (with no fire risk as it's ~2m away from the roof and surrounded by concrete) and we'd then need to go through the underground process. Best case it all works and we've saved the need to go underground.  
As far as I can see it, this leaves us with three options: Go back to the neighbours and offer to pay for all (or a significant % of) their underground conversion costGet the air-conditioning installed and 'see what happens'Do nothing and wait ~5-10 years until our whole street gets converted to underground power before getting air-conditioning  
We are leaning towards #2 as it will keep costs low, will ensure we have aircon before summer hits & we assume if the cable does burn out we won't be required to pay for the neighbours connection but despite the electrician recommending it to us it seems a little dodgy!  
What are your thoughts? I have put an image below to help.

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## phild01

Hi OverI, your image does not appear and could be the file size is too large. Try reducing the image file size to under 1Mb and upload again.

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## OverInterview

I tried to re-upload my image as per your suggestion but now it appears by whole post has been removed. Any idea how I can get this back?

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## phild01

> I tried to re-upload my image as per your suggestion but now it appears by whole post has been removed. Any idea how I can get this back?

  Weird but it is back again.

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## r3nov8or

> Weird but it is back again.

  Nup, no can see

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## droog

> Nup, no can see

   Try over here https://www.renovateforum.com/f195/u...3/#post1140942 
Maybe mods can sort the two threads.

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## phild01

> Nup, no can see

  But it is there when I look  
Follow Droog's suggestion:
Closing this thread, not required.

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## phild01

.

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