Strata18 July 2026

Strata Meter Room Upgrades: What Owners Corporations Should Know

A 1970s meter room quietly limits what every owner in the block can do. Here’s how strata metering upgrades work.

Australian Owned & Operated

NSW Level 2 ASP

Licensed Electricians

Fully Insured

AS/NZS 3000 Compliant Work

Ausgrid Service Area

Endeavour Energy Service Area

Essential Energy Service Area

Residential, Commercial and Strata

Work completed in accordance with applicable NSW network, metering and electrical requirements.

The Problem: A Meter Room Stuck in the 1970s

Older apartment blocks often run banks of ageing meters in cramped rooms with legacy wiring. That creates real limits: owners can’t get EV chargers approved, common-area solar stalls, and individual unit renovations get rejected because there’s no capacity or space at the metering position.

Because the meter room is common property serving many separately-billed units, no single owner can fix it — and quotes are hard to compare when most electricians can’t do the network-side portion anyway.

The Solution: A Staged, Building-Wide Metering Plan

The workable approach is a building-level assessment: capacity of the supply, condition of the main switchboard and meter panels, and what the owners actually want to enable (EV, solar, unit upgrades). From there, upgrades can be staged — panel and protection first, meter exchanges as needed — with outages scheduled and notified properly.

Smart Meter Australia works with strata managers and committees across Sydney as a Level 2 ASP, handling the network coordination, the common-property switchgear and the individual metering in one scope.

The Result: A Building That Can Say Yes

With a modern meter room, the owners corporation can approve EV chargers and solar with confidence, unit renovations stop hitting metering roadblocks, and the building’s electrical risk profile drops.

Managing a block with an old meter room? Call 0466 125 125 to arrange an assessment your committee can actually make decisions from.

COMMON QUESTIONS

Who pays — the owners corporation or individual owners?

Common-property elements like panels, mains and switchgear are typically owners corporation costs; an individual meter exchange serving one lot is usually that owner’s. We itemise quotes so the split is clear.

Will the whole building lose power during works?

Outages are staged and notified in advance. Well-planned works isolate sections of the metering rather than the entire building at once wherever the installation allows it.