What electrical inspections involves

The wiring in an older Illinois house was never sized for how people live now. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With electrical inspections, 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

Panels, rewires, outlets, lighting and the circuits behind everything in a house. Most of these calls come from Des Plaines and the surrounding suburbs, but we take them anywhere in our service area.

Older Illinois buildings rarely match the drawings, if there are drawings at all. Circuits wander between floors, junction boxes hide above ceilings, and a single breaker might feed a bedroom and half the kitchen. Tracing it properly is the first hour of a lot of jobs.

How we do it

Quik Wire Electric has 3 years in business and 10 years of electrical experience behind it. The work goes in to code, gets tested and comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

What we see go wrong

Most of the bad work we find was not done by an electrician. It was a handyman, a previous owner or somebody who watched a video. Backstabbed outlets, undersized conductors, missing grounds, neutrals and grounds bonded in a subpanel, junctions buried inside a wall with no box.

None of that is visible from the living room. It surfaces during a remodel, a home inspection, or the day a breaker stops holding.

What happens when we are done

Before we leave, everything we installed or repaired gets tested under load. Then we walk you through what we did, show you the panel, and point out anything we noticed that you should keep an eye on. You know what was done and why.

Where a permit was pulled you get the closed inspection. Where documentation exists, you get it.

Code, permits and inspection

Touching an old circuit can bring it under the current code. Extend a bedroom circuit and you may need arc-fault protection on it. Replace a kitchen outlet and it may need ground-fault protection. We tell you about those requirements before the work, so they are in the quote.

We deal with whichever jurisdiction the job sits in. We pull the permit, we schedule the inspection, and we are there when the inspector walks it. You get the paperwork at the end, which matters when you sell the building or when an insurer asks.

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

If water is anywhere near the panel or an outlet, do not touch either one. Stay out of the wet area, keep everyone back, and call us. A flooded basement with live circuits is a job for us, not for a pair of rubber boots.

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.