Moving Premises: A Business Electricity Checklist

Moving premises is the moment when business electricity arrangements are most likely to go wrong, because everything that was set up for the old site has to be reconsidered for the new one. A short checklist prevents the common mistakes.

Before you leave the old site

Arrange a final meter read for the day you vacate, so the last bill covers exactly the period you occupied the premises and nothing after it. Without a final read, a bill can arrive covering a period when someone else was using the site.

Keep a copy of your final bill. It is also a useful record of your usage profile at the old site, which is a reasonable starting point for estimating what the new site might need — though the two are rarely identical.

At the new site

Establish who is currently supplying electricity to the premises and on what tariff, because the new site's network tariff is what a comparison must be built on. It may differ from the tariff at your old site even if the two are geographically close.

If the site has different equipment — a larger cool room, additional three-phase machinery, on-site solar — the usage shape will differ from the old premises, and so will the best plan. Moving is a moment to compare from scratch rather than to carry the old plan across.

Metering and connection

Check what metering is installed and whether it supports the kind of plan you want. Some structures — particularly those that rely on interval data or demand measurement — require suitable metering to be billed accurately.

Where a new connection or an upgrade is needed, that is arranged through the network business and can take time, so it is worth starting early rather than discovering the limitation after you have chosen a plan.

The first bill at the new site

Treat the first bill at a new site as a calibration point rather than a verdict: it may cover a partial period, and it will not yet reflect a full cycle of the site's real usage. Compare the site's actual pattern against what you assumed when choosing the plan.

If the usage shape turns out to be materially different from what you expected, re-run the comparison with the real numbers. A plan chosen on an estimate is worth revisiting once the estimate is replaced by data.

Put it into practice

Upload an electricity bill to run a comparison on your site's actual usage, or read more business electricity guides.

Related guides

Business electricity by state

Network operators and market rules differ across Australia, so the mechanics described above play out differently depending on where your site is.