What electrical service replacements involves

Commercial electrical work gets judged on two things: does it pass, and did it delay the trade behind you. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With electrical service replacements, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

Where repair makes more sense than replacement, we repair. Swapping out equipment that still has years left in it is good business for a contractor and a bad deal for you.

Where this comes up

Build-outs, tenant work, lighting and three-phase power for buildings that cannot go dark. Most of these calls come from Des Plaines and the surrounding suburbs, but we take them anywhere in our service area.

Ungrounded two-wire circuits are still common, along with three-prong outlets installed on top of them with no ground behind the plate. The outlet looks right. The tester says otherwise, and that changes how the job is planned.

How we do it

One crew handles residential, commercial and municipal work, so the person in your basement has seen harder jobs than yours. Everything goes in to code and passes inspection where one is required.

Why it usually cannot wait

Electrical problems do not stay the same size. A loose connection heats up, the heat oxidizes the metal, the oxidized metal raises the resistance, and the resistance makes more heat. That loop runs in one direction only and it ends at a scorched box.

If something is tripping, buzzing, warm to the touch or smells like hot plastic, that is the system telling you where the problem is while it is still cheap to fix.

How we quote it

On a lot of small jobs we can look and quote in the same visit, before we leave. Bigger work, like a service upgrade, gets a written quote after we have run the load calculation and checked what the village will require.

We keep quotes simple to read: each item, what it covers and its price. If something comes up on site that the quote did not cover, you hear about it from us before it becomes part of the bill.

The inspection is the point

An inspection is an independent check that what went behind the drywall matches what was supposed to. Work that passes has been verified by somebody with no stake in the invoice.

That is also why we would rather you hire a licensed contractor than the cheapest number you can find. Unpermitted electrical work is a problem you inherit, and it usually surfaces at the worst moment.

Copper, aluminum and what is in your walls

Aluminum branch wiring went into a lot of houses in the late sixties and early seventies. It is not automatically dangerous, but it expands and contracts more than copper, which loosens terminations over time, and it needs devices and connectors rated for it.

The repair is usually not a full rewire. Proper connectors at every termination, done thoroughly, solves most of it. Anybody quoting you a whole-house rewire on sight has not looked.

When to stop and call

Turn the circuit off and pick up the phone if a switch is hot, a receptacle has discolored, or there is a buzz you can trace to a device or the panel. Do not keep resetting and hoping.

Do not keep resetting a breaker that will not hold. It is doing its job. Something downstream is drawing more than the circuit is rated for, or there is a fault, and repeated resets remove the one protection that is working.