Troubleshooting & Repairs

What people call us about

The most common call is a circuit that isn’t working. That covers a lot of ground. One customer’s laundry room light had gone out, and the cause was a failed breaker in her panel.

Other calls we get often:

• Half the house has no power. On one call like this, the problem wasn’t in the house at all. The utility’s service coming into the house was faulty, so we put the homeowner in touch with the power company to fix it.
• The well won’t pump, or the air conditioner won’t start. A lot of people want the circuit checked before they pay the well or HVAC company to come out. Many times the circuit is fine and the equipment has failed, and then you know who to call next.
• The lights went out in the shed or another outbuilding.

A breaker that kept tripping

An office in town had an air conditioner that kept shutting off. The owner would reset the breaker, it would run for a while, and then it would trip again. He’d decided the breaker was bad, and he could probably have swapped it himself. Instead he called us and said that before he did anything, he wanted somebody who knew what they were doing to look at it.

When we snapped the breaker out of the panel, one of its spring clips was missing. Those clips hold a double-pole breaker tight on the bus bar, the metal strip in the panel that feeds it. Without one, the connection was loose and the breaker was getting hot. We replaced it. A while later we were nearby, stopped in, and asked if it was still tripping. It wasn’t.

Why industrial experience helps in a house

Nathan spent years in chemical plants, power plants and industrial buildings, working on motor controls and control systems. In his words, “most residential circuitry is pretty simple compared to what motor controls are, but the theory is pretty much all the same.” That deeper background is what lets us track down a house problem quickly.

Older houses around here

There are a lot of older houses in this area. Anything wired before ground wires became code in the 1960s has two-prong outlets. A common shortcut is to swap in three-prong outlets on the same two-wire circuit, with no ground behind them. That’s more dangerous than it was before, because now you’re plugging things in believing there’s a ground when there isn’t one. There are code-acceptable ways to upgrade those outlets.

What a service call costs

We tell you our minimum service charge on the phone, before we come. As Nathan puts it, “I don’t want to get there and then bill somebody at my rates and they’re in shock because they didn’t know what it was going to cost.”

A service call goes straight to troubleshooting, with no separate estimate. If we find an electrical problem that needs repair, we give you a price for the repair, or keep going by the hour if you’d rather.

You pay at the end of the call, by cash, credit card, or a personal check on a local bank.

If something we did fails

If anything we installed fails because of how we installed it, we come back and fix it. With service work, a problem like that usually shows up quickly, within about 30 days.