What flood lighting involves

Lighting is the part of an electrical system people actually look at. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With flood lighting, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

Honest answer first. If what you have is fine, we say it is fine. If it needs work, we tell you how much and why, with the urgent parts separated from the ones that can wait.

Where this comes up

Interior, exterior, parking lots, athletic fields and the controls that run them. 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

The electrician who quotes the job comes from the same crew that does it. We work to the current code, test every circuit before we leave and label the panel so the next person can read it.

What changes with an older building

Buildings in this part of Illinois cover about a century of wiring practice. Knob-and-tube in the oldest, cloth-insulated branch circuits after that, aluminum wiring in a stretch of the sixties and seventies, and modern copper since. Each one fails differently and each one has its own repair path.

We look at what is actually in the walls before quoting, because guessing from the year the house was built is how people end up with a surprise halfway through.

Who actually shows up

The person who shows up is a licensed electrician who works for us. No subcontracted crew you have never heard of. Small jobs get the same people as large ones, start to finish.

You get told who is coming and roughly when. If we are running late you get a call, which should be the baseline in this trade and somehow is not.

What the permit actually buys you

A permit puts the work on the public record for the address. When the building changes hands, that record is evidence the electrical was done and checked. Without it, a buyer's inspector treats everything they find as suspect.

It also means the work was sized and installed to the code edition in force, not to whatever was normal when the building went up.

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

If a breaker trips again right after you reset it, leave it off and call. Same if a faceplate feels warm to the touch or the panel is humming. Resetting a breaker over and over is how a small fault becomes a fire.

Half the house losing power while the other half keeps working usually means one leg of the service has dropped. Sometimes the fault is in the panel, sometimes on the utility side. Either way, stop troubleshooting and call so we can find out which.

Lighting is a wiring problem first

Most lighting complaints are not about the fixture. They are about how many circuits are available, where the switches are, whether the dimmer matches the driver in the lamp, and whether the boxes can carry the weight of what is going on them.

Retrofitting LED into fittings designed for incandescent introduces its own issues, usually flicker or buzz from a dimmer that was never meant for an electronic load.