On 61st Street since 2003
About Woodside Electric Services
Six people, one shop, and a working area you can drive across in twenty minutes. We have stayed that size deliberately, and this page explains what that decision costs us and what it buys you.
How it started
Twenty-three years on the same block
Daniel Okafor opened this shop in 2003 after eleven years running other people's crews on commercial service work in Manhattan. The reason was specific and slightly petty: he was repeatedly told to leave a job at the point where it was working but not yet right, because the remaining hours were not billable. He got tired of it.
The company has grown to six people and stopped there. That is a decision rather than a limitation. Past about this size an electrical contractor becomes a business that sells electrical work, with salespeople who do not hold tools and crews who did not price the job — and the gap between what was promised and what gets built opens up in that space. Here the person who quotes your job is the person who does it, and there is nobody whose income depends on you buying something larger.
Marisol Reyes joined in 2009 and holds the second Master Electrician licence. She runs everything that reaches the Department of Buildings, which is the unglamorous half of this trade and the half that determines whether your work still counts for anything in ten years.
Four decisions
What the rest of this website follows from
Every page here is downstream of four commitments. They cost us money regularly, which is the only reason they are worth stating.
Everything that needs filing gets filed
We do not compete on price with contractors who leave the permit out, and we will not pretend that is the same job with less paperwork. It is work nobody will ever inspect, sold by somebody who would prefer it were not.
We say when you do not need the work
A great deal of what this trade sells is work that did not need doing yet. If your panel has ten good years in it, that is what the report says, and we lose the job.
Prices are published as real ranges
Not a low headline number that moves once somebody is in your basement. The low end is a straightforward version of the job and the high end is one with a genuine access problem.
We say what we could not see
No report from us claims a building is safe. It says what was found, what was tested and what could not be reached — and the last of those is the part that makes the other two worth reading.
The buildings we work in
Woodside is a specific electrical problem
Most of this neighbourhood was built between 1910 and 1950, in two- and three-family houses that have been subdivided, extended, converted and re-let over a century. That produces a recognisable set of conditions: original wiring still live behind plaster, service equipment added to in every decade since, grounding arrangements that were correct when the water service was metal pipe, and circuits that cross between units in ways nobody recorded.
Knowing that in advance is most of the value of a local contractor. We know what is likely to be behind your wall before we open it, which routes exist in a house of this pattern, and which of the alarming things a home inspector wrote down are actually normal for the stock. It also means we are rarely surprised, and surprises are what make jobs expensive.
In numbers
The shape of the firm
- Founded
- 2003
- People
- 6
- Master Electricians
- 2
- Services offered
- 28
- Neighbourhoods
- 12
- Languages
- English, Spanish, Tagalog
- Workmanship guarantee
- 2 years
- Awards claimed
- None
Nobody has voted us anything. We claim no award, no ranking, no accreditation badge and no rating from any directory, review platform or trade body. There are no customer reviews or star ratings anywhere on this website, because a rating you cannot trace to a real customer is decoration. We name no manufacturer as a partner and wear nobody's logo. What we will tell you is who holds the licence, what it permits, and where you can check it for yourself.
Somebody who does the work will come and look
Book a visit
Telephone the shop and you will get an electrician rather than a call centre. For defined work — a panel, a charger, a lighting scheme — the quote is free. For a fault, the visit is the diagnosis and it is $165 for the first hour, credited against the work if you go ahead the same visit. Either way we will tell you on the telephone which one it is.