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Hello, i figured it may be useful to start a thread that would pull together peoples experiances of trying to gt to Oz as a spark, or what it's like over there as one..! It seems there are a lot of us out there! i am mainly domestic, but with a good measure of 3-phase and light commercial thrown in! I am on my way to Oz, have let our property in London and are travelling around to get a feel of where to live, probably somewhere north of Sydney. I did the Vetassess in the summer of 2008, i am waiting for the 175 to come through and will then be applying for the ARTC, i am going to try to do the wiring reg's asap and then apply for the license without much on shore experinace as i have been told it is possible.... well worth a punt anyhow..! To start the 'helpful' bit of this thread off the following is what my Vetassess day was like; Vetassess assesment is very broad, it seems to look at electronics, domestic wiring as well as light industrial, they seem to be looking for a general level of competance and an understanding of most things. Electrical units you are quite right in that they expect you to know all of the basic definitions (V, I, R, Z, etc) this will ensure you can understand / answer the paper based question... ELV, yes 50v in a AC circuit and 120v in a DC... etc etc.. As far as learning all of the formulas off by heart it can do your head in slightly, what i did was refresh myself with all of the basics, ohm's law, reisitance & reactance calculations, RMS etc, i did take a few notes in with me but to honest never needed them.. What did come up that i didn't expect though was transformer winds ratio's and quite a lot of health and safety stuff. One thing to note (which did worry me a bit!) is that it is all done to our reg's not the AUS/NZ reg's as they are quite different in some respects.. If it helps i will just quickly run through my day for you; 07.45 regsitration, we had to show passports for id etc. 08.00 paper based test, we had to do a few ohms law calculations, resisitance calculations showing overall resistance of circuits with resistors connected in series and/or connected in parrallel, transformer wind ratio's and some general health and safety stuff. 09.00 we were taken into the main practicle room, here we were each given our own boothe, we had to then instal from a paper diagram a consumer unit with x2 circuits, one was for a socket outlet, one was for a lighting circuit with a two way lighting arrangement. the installation used all methods of wirng, T&E clipped, in plastic conduit, metal conduit and loose cable also... this took all day as whilst this was going on we were each individually taken off to do the following; 1, wire up a DOL motor control circuit with thermal overload and on/off switching, we could choose whether to wire it in star or delta. 2, had to connect up a simple pin board with resistors and then calculate the overall resistance of the circuit one arrangement being with the resistors in parrallel and one with a couple in series as well, we also had to test it to prove our calculations. 3, we then had to safely isolate and disconnect a dummy motor, we had to lock it off, apply safety tag's and notices, note down the direction of rotation, power rating, etc, we then had to reconnect it. prior to doing this though we had to write down the whole of the isolation and disconnection process as if we were on site, and the reconnection process, we then also had to test to prove all was safe. finally we then had to test our main installtion, all of the basic domestic tests you would expect, we all aslo had to prove our 2 way lighting worked! The day ended around 4pm, we had all had a 1hr lunch break. There were 8 guys on my test day including myself, all of us bar one had brought our own tools, the guy who hadn't was lent some so it didn't seem to matter either way... I hope this thread proves useful, if not then... at least i tried..! If anyone has any useful infor about the ARTC, wiring reg's, on shore experiance or contractor license i would greatly appreciate it.. All the best and hppy sparkin... James...