Frequently asked questions

For most of it, yes. In New York City electrical work is filed with the Department of Buildings, and only a licensed Master or Special Electrician can file it — a homeowner cannot pull an electrical permit here, whatever a neighbour tells you. Replacing a light fitting or a switch on an existing circuit is maintenance and needs no filing. New circuits, panel work, service changes and rewires do. We will tell you which side of that line your job falls on before you commit to anything.

Our diagnostic visit is $165 for the first hour, which covers finding out what is actually wrong. Beyond that we quote the job rather than the hour, and every service page on this site publishes the range that job usually lands in. Those are honest ranges rather than teaser numbers: the low end is a straightforward version of the job and the high end is one with a hard access problem, and we will tell you which one you have after we have looked.

It depends entirely on which one it is. Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco panels have a documented history of breakers failing to trip on an overload, and we recommend replacing those on the evidence. A sound panel of the same age from a maker with no such history usually wants nothing more than a proper inspection and correct torquing. Anybody who tells you a panel is a fire waiting to happen without naming the make and showing you the reason is selling you something.

Usually not. The Consumer Product Safety Commission accepts permanent repair at the connections — pigtailing every accessible termination with an approved connector — as an alternative to complete replacement, and for most Queens houses that is a fraction of the cost and the disruption. A full rewire is the right answer when the wiring is failing for other reasons too. We will price both, and tell you which one your house actually needs.

Not with a device that plugs into a wall. Those do not work, and we do not sell them. What genuinely saves money is changing what your lighting draws and how long it runs, and that is arithmetic — your fixture count, your hours, your rate. Priya will do it in front of you, and if it does not pay back inside a sensible period she will tell you not to do the job.

Not for a quote on defined work — a panel replacement, an EV charger, a lighting scheme. We do charge for diagnosis, because finding out why half your apartment is dark is the skilled part of the job, and “free estimate” is how that cost gets hidden in a price later. The $165 diagnostic hour is credited against the work if you go ahead the same visit.

Yes — and so is everybody who says so, which is why the sentence is worth almost nothing on its own. What matters is the licence number, whose name it is in, and that you can check it. Ours is printed on the licensing page. Note that this is a demonstration website for a company that does not exist, so the number shown there is a placeholder rather than a real licensee's.

Somebody on this crew answers the on-call telephone every night, and it is an electrician rather than an answering service. We will give you a real time when you call, rather than a number of minutes printed on a website. If the safe answer is to call Con Edison or the fire department instead of us, we will tell you that immediately, and there is no charge for it.

Yes — and we do it often enough that it is worth putting on the front page. A great deal of what gets sold in this trade is work that did not need doing yet. If your panel has ten good years left, if your grounding is sound, or if the fault is a fifteen-dollar device rather than a rewire, that is what the report will say.

Yes. Much of Woodside is two- and three-family houses and small co-ops, and a good deal of what we do is inside one unit of a building somebody else manages. We are used to working with a managing agent, filing correctly for a building we do not own, and keeping the common areas clean.

Woodside first, and the rest of western and central Queens around it — Sunnyside, Astoria, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Maspeth, Long Island City, Rego Park, Corona, Middle Village, Ridgewood and Forest Hills. Outside that we will still take the call, but we will tell you honestly if somebody closer to you can be there sooner.

Sometimes you need to, and often you do not — and the way to find out is a load calculation rather than a guess. Plenty of Queens houses on a 100 amp service will take a Level 2 charger on a properly calculated circuit; plenty of others will not. We do the calculation first, at $340, and you get the answer before anybody has spent thousands on a service upgrade that may not have been necessary.

No, and neither can anybody else. We guarantee our own workmanship, in writing, for two years on labour. What we cannot do is certify a building, because an inspection reports on what was accessible on the day and we cannot see inside a finished wall. A contractor who offers to certify your home as safe is offering you a feeling rather than a finding.

Because there is no honest way to put one here. This is a demonstration site for a fictional company, so any review on it would be invented; and even on a real contractor's site, a rating you cannot trace back to a named job is decoration. We would rather tell you what we do, and let you check the licence.

Work stops, and you get a telephone call before any money is spent. Old houses in Queens routinely hide a splice in a wall cavity, a circuit that feeds two apartments, or a run of the old wiring somebody left live behind plaster. Finding those is normal. Spending your money on them without asking is not.

Yes. A dead outlet, a fan that needs a rated box, two dimmers and a doorbell. Small jobs are how most people meet an electrician, and we would rather do yours properly than tell you we only take rewires.

Please do — as long as you stay outside the working area when something is live. We will explain what we are doing and why. What we will not do is talk you through doing it yourself later: not out of protectiveness about the trade, but because proving a circuit is dead is a different skill from switching it off, and that is where people get hurt.

A straightforward panel replacement is a day and a half on site, plus the inspection afterwards. Power is off for most of one of those days, and we will tell you which day so you can plan around it. A full service upgrade takes longer, because the utility has its own schedule and we do not control it.

Yes. Dust sheets go down before anything else happens, holes we make get made good, and the site is swept before we leave each day rather than at the end of the job. We would rather you never thought about it, which is the point.

That is a good use of the $385 inspection, and we are asked for it regularly — usually after somebody else has quoted a rewire. You get a written report on what we found, and if the first contractor was right, we will say so plainly.