What industrial lighting involves

Industrial electrical work runs at voltages that do not forgive shortcuts. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With industrial lighting, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

It starts with a look at the panel and the circuits involved. From there we tell you what has to be done, what can wait and what was never a problem at all.

Where this comes up

Motor controls, machinery wiring, 480V systems and plant distribution. 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

Phone quotes in this trade usually come in low and climb once someone opens the wall. We would rather spend the time up front, find what is behind the drywall and give you one number that holds.

The quote spells out what we will do, item by item, and what it costs. If we open up a box or a panel and find the job is different, we pause and walk you through it before any more work happens.

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.

What to do before we arrive

Write down which breakers you already flipped and in what order. If several are off now, leave them that way rather than trying to put things back. It is faster for us to work from a known state than to undo guesses.

Tell us what was plugged in when it happened and roughly what time it was. The more specific you are, the faster we find it.