What retail lighting involves

Good lighting is a wiring problem before it is a fixture problem. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With retail lighting, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

We tell you what we find before we tell you what it costs. If the scope is smaller than you expected, it gets smaller. That happens more often than people assume.

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.

Previous work is the wild card. Plenty of Illinois homes and shops have circuits somebody extended on a weekend, splices buried in a wall with no box, and breakers upsized to stop a nuisance trip. We find those first, because they decide what is safe to build on.

How we do it

Every connection gets tightened properly and every wire is sized for the load it carries. Where the village requires a permit, the inspector signs off on it, so the standard is on paper as well as in the wall.

Why this is worth doing properly

A bad electrical connection does not fail politely. It heats, it chars the box around it, and eventually starts a fire inside a wall where nobody can see it. That is why the licensing exists and why an inspector looks at the work. Every connection has to be tight, every conductor sized for the load it will actually carry, every box accessible afterwards.

The cost of doing it right the first time is almost always lower than the cost of doing it twice. We would rather tell you the job is bigger than you hoped than come back in two years.

Scheduling and how long it takes

Same-day for emergencies, any day of the week. For scheduled work, plan on a few days of lead time, longer only when a permit has to be issued or ComEd has to cut and restore power.

Some dates are ours to set and some belong to somebody else. The install day is ours. The village inspection and any ComEd disconnect are not, so we book those first and build our part of the schedule around them.

Code, permits and inspection

Unincorporated areas usually fall under the county for permits instead of a village. The process, the paperwork and the inspection schedule can all differ, so the first question on any permitted job is simply who has jurisdiction at that address.

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.

Grounding and bonding

Grounding is the part nobody sees and the part that decides whether a fault clears safely. The ground path has to be continuous and low-impedance from every device back to the service, and the neutral and ground can only be bonded together in one place.

A neutral bonded to ground in a subpanel is one of the most common defects we find. It works right up until it does not, and then it puts current on metal that people touch.

The warning signs people ignore

Lights that dim when a large appliance starts. Outlets that only work sometimes. A breaker that trips every few weeks rather than every day. A faceplate that is warm. Each of those is a fault that has not finished developing yet.

Warm is a warning. A switch, outlet or breaker should never feel hot, and heat at a device means current is fighting a bad connection.

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.