Antenna installation day in Bunbury, stage by stage
A standard single-storey install takes 2 to 3 hours from the van arriving to the last set retuned. Double-storey or tile adds an hour or more. You need one power point, roughly 6 metres of kerb for the van, the side gate unlocked and the roof space manhole clear. Somebody has to be there at the start and at the handover, but not for the two hours in between.
Most people have never watched an antenna go on before, so the day feels longer and more disruptive in the imagination than it is on the clock. Below is what actually happens on a Bunbury job, in order, with real timings from real houses in this town, what stalls each stage, and a printable checklist you can tick off the night before so nothing holds the crew up.
Every stage of a Bunbury antenna install
Timings are for a single-storey tin roof with reasonable access. Tile, double-storey and coastal jobs with corroded fixings sit at the long end of each range.
| Stage | How long | What happens | What you need to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Quote and booking | Reply within 1 business day | We read the form, ask for a photo if we need one, and either price it from the detail or book a free on-site measure. | Send the suburb, roof type, symptom and a photo of the antenna and the wall plate. |
| 2. Arrival | 2 hour window | Van arrives, we confirm the scope against the written quote and walk the outside of the house together. | Have the gate unlocked and the driveway clear before the window opens. |
| 3. Walk through and signal test | 10 - 20 min | Meter the existing signal at each wall plate, inspect the antenna from ground level, agree exactly where any new outlet goes. | Show us every TV in the house, including the one in the shed or the caravan. |
| 4. Roof access and safety setup | 15 - 30 min | Ladder set and tied off, edge protection or an anchor where the pitch or the height calls for it, tools and hardware taken up. | Keep children and pets away from the base of the ladder for the rest of the job. |
| 5. Old antenna removed | 10 - 20 min | Old head, mast and any rusted bracket come off, the fixing holes are sealed, and the lot goes straight in the van. | Nothing. |
| 6. Mount, aim and secure | 30 - 60 min | Bracket bedded or fixed, mast plumbed, antenna assembled and aimed at Mount Lennard while a meter reads live at the antenna rather than at the TV. | Nothing. Expect footsteps overhead for most of this stage. |
| 7. Lead in cable and earth | 30 - 60 min | Quad shield RG6 run and clipped, drip loop formed, wall entry sealed, mast bonded and earthed to AS 1417. | Keep the roof space manhole clear and the area under it empty. |
| 8. Amplifier, splitter and outlets | 20 - 45 min | Masthead amplifier and power injector fitted only where the metering called for one, splitter sized to the number of outlets, new plates fitted and labelled. | Point out the power point the injector can live near. |
| 9. Retune and metering | 15 - 40 min | Every set retuned, then level and quality measured and written down at each outlet so you have a baseline for later. | Have every remote handy, plus any parental or setup PIN codes. |
| 10. Clean up and handover | 10 - 15 min | Magnet sweep for dropped screws, offcuts collected, holes sealed, readings and warranty handed over, invoice emailed. | Walk the job with us and check every set yourself before we leave. |
Single-storey tin: 2 to 3 hours all up. Double-storey or tile: 3 to 4.5 hours. Adding a wall mounted TV or an extra outlet adds 30 to 60 minutes each.
What actually stalls a job
Almost every install that runs long runs long for one of these seven reasons, and five of them are fixable the night before.
- A locked side gate and nobody home. The single most common cause of a wasted window. If you cannot be there, leave the gate unlocked or leave a key with a neighbour and tell us which house.
- No roof space access, or a manhole stacked with boxes. Cable to a second or third outlet almost always travels through the roof space. If the manhole is in a wardrobe full of storage, that is 20 minutes of moving somebody else’s belongings before the work starts.
- Asbestos cement sheeting. Plenty of Bunbury and Withers homes built before the late 1980s have asbestos cement eaves, soffits or wall sheeting. We do not drill it, cut it or disturb it. If the only cable path goes through it, we stop, tell you, and recommend a licensed removalist. That is a hard rule and it is not negotiable.
- Brittle roof tiles. Old cement and terracotta tiles crack under foot on a cold morning. We carry a few spares, but a roof that is generally at the end of its life is a job for a roofer first and us second.
- Solar panels across the best mast position. Common on newer Eaton and Dalyellup roofs. It is solvable, but it means a different bracket position, a longer cable run and a slightly different price, which we would rather discuss at the measure than on the day.
- The original cable buried in rendered double brick. If the existing lead in was chased in and rendered over, it cannot simply be pulled through. The fix is a new surface run in conduit or a different path, and it adds 30 to 60 minutes.
- The TV position changing mid job. Deciding at stage eight that the TV should be on the other wall means new cable, a new hole and a new plate. Decide it at stage three and it costs nothing.
Want a date in the diary?
Send the suburb and the job and we will come back within one business day with a fixed price and the next available window.
Access, parking, power and water
The van needs roughly 6 metres of kerb or a clear driveway, because the ladder comes off the roof rack lengthways. That is easy in most of Australind and Eaton, harder in the narrower Dalyellup estate streets where cars park both sides, and harder again in the Bunbury CBD where a lot of street parking is time limited. If your street is tight, tell us at booking and we will bring the shorter ladder setup or plan for a longer carry.
We need one ordinary power point, usually inside near the TV, for a drill charger and for the amplifier power injector if one is being fitted. The house power never has to be switched off, no meter box work is involved, and no water is used at any point in the job. If a masthead amplifier is going in, its injector needs to live permanently near a wall socket, so it is worth deciding at the walk through which socket you are happy to give up.
Noise, dust, smell, pets and working from home
There is far less loud work in an antenna install than people expect. The genuinely noisy part is a rotary hammer through double brick, which runs 2 to 4 minutes per hole and happens two or three times on a typical job, so the total loud time is usually under 15 minutes. What is constant, and what surprises people, is footfall on the roof. Under a Colorbond roof it carries into every room in the house, and there is no way to make it quieter.
Dust is minor. Brick and masonry dust is caught with a vacuum held at the drill head, and the roof space work produces nothing beyond a little insulation fibre that stays up there. There are no solvents on an antenna job and no glues, and the only sealant used is a neutral cure product, which does not leave the vinegar smell that cheap acetic silicone gives a room for two days.
Dogs react to footsteps on the roof far more than to the drill, and a dog barking at the ceiling for two hours is harder on the dog than on us. Bring them inside or drop them at a neighbour. For children, the hazard is not the noise, it is the base of the ladder and the tools at the bottom of it, so keep that zone off limits for the whole visit. If you are working from home, tell us at the walk through when your meetings are. We can almost always do the drilling either side of a call, because the loud work is short and the roof work is not.
Prepare for the crew: tick these off the night before
Nineteen small things that between them remove 20 to 40 minutes of paid time from the job and stop the two most common delays. Your ticks are saved in this browser, so you can come back to the list.
Before the day
Access and parking
Inside the house
At handover, before you pay
Weather, and why Bunbury has two bad windows
We do not work on a wet roof, in rain, or in strong wind, and that is a safety rule rather than a preference. Between about May and September the fronts that cross the South West can arrive faster than a forecast suggests, which is why we contact you on the morning of a winter job rather than leaving you waiting at home. A postponed job keeps its place at the front of the queue and there is no charge for the change.
Summer has the opposite problem. A dark Colorbond roof in a Bunbury February is too hot to kneel on safely by late morning, so coastal and north-facing jobs get booked early and finished before the heat. Winter mornings have their own catch: cement and terracotta tiles are at their most brittle when they are cold and damp, so first thing on a July morning is the worst possible time to walk an old tile roof. Mid morning, after the frost has gone and before the sea breeze builds, is the sweet spot for most of the year. If you have flexibility on timing, the best time to replace an antenna page goes into the seasonal side properly.
What a clean site looks like, and where the waste goes
A finished job should look like this: no swarf or metal filings on the roof or in the gutter, no cable offcuts anywhere, a magnet sweep done across the roof and the ground below it, every old fixing hole sealed, cable clipped at even spacings with a drip loop before the wall entry, the wall plate square and flush, the furniture back where it started, and the readings written on the paperwork. A dropped roof screw left in a gutter will rust and stain Colorbond within a season, which is why the magnet sweep is not optional.
The old antenna, the mast, the brackets and the copper cored coax all have scrap value, so they go in the van and on to a metal recycler rather than into your bin. Packaging from the new hardware leaves with us too. There is no charge for any of that. An old television is the one thing we do not take: Western Australia banned e-waste from landfill from 1 July 2024, so a dead TV has to go to a designated drop-off point rather than out with a kerbside collection, and it needs to be handled through that system rather than thrown in the back of a trade van.
If you want to know what standards the finished work is measured against, the standards and compliance page sets them out, and what happens if something goes wrong afterwards is covered on the warranty page. If you are still deciding on hardware, see choosing an antenna for coastal Bunbury. And in the honest column: if your antenna is only a few years old and the fault is intermittent, none of this day may be necessary at all, because a repair and retune at $130 to $280 is often the whole answer.
Book an installation window that suits you
Send the suburb and the job and we will reply within one business day with a fixed price and the next available two hour window.
Installation day questions
How long does an antenna installation take in Bunbury?
Do I need to be home for the whole antenna job?
How noisy and messy is an antenna installation?
What happens if it rains on installation day in Bunbury?
What do I need to move before the crew arrives?
What happens to the old antenna and the rubbish?
Ready to get it booked?
Free measure, fixed written price, tidy site, and a 5 year workmanship warranty. Bunbury, Australind, Eaton, Dalyellup, Gelorup and Withers.