Am electrician, can confirm.
To be fair, I don’t get called out to fix good work. If something’s fucked, it’s usually because some “handyman” who “totally knows what he’s doing” was there before.
Between that, and the fact that most of the people involved in wiring up houses are just laborers under an electrician’s supervision (ostensibly), yeah, I get plenty to complain about.
It also makes it easier, I feel, for customers to stomach the bill if I can adequately explain how much better off they are now that I’ve done my job.
Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.
Kinda depends? But yeah they’re mostly separate.
When I worked for a shop (self-employed now), they had us divided into Construction and Service, and the two pretty much kept to themselves. Service guys looked down on Construction guys because they didn’t know much about troubleshooting; Construction guys looked down on Service guys because most of them couldn’t build their way out of a wet paper bag.
Most of my experience as an apprentice was construction. I did some service calls now and then when jobsites slowed down in the winter. Now I mostly do service calls, and, frankly, it’s a HELL of a lot easier.
Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.
The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!
Repair electricians definitely run into the work of install electricians, but my experience is they’re mostly two different groups. Install electricians may come back to do repairs on their own work, or if there’s a lull in new construction jobs they can pick up they might fill in the hours with some smaller repair jobs.
There are some some more specialized electricians that do a mix of both, for example my company is mostly generator focused. We’re involved in both new construction and repairs for things that are generator/transfer switch/solar related.
That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?
Yeah, there’s a lot of questionable work out there. Many homeowners underestimate the difficulty involved in some repairs too, so there’s definitely a need to justify why it took as long as it did.
On my jobsite, working in new construction, we still complain a lot about what the people before us did. Everybody on the crew is a competent electrician, yet we still have plenty of times where we look at the most experienced electrician there and think “wth was he thinking??”
I feel love the ironic part is that both good and bad electricians can have the same outcome. Some wacky installation that works. The difference is that the bad guy probably doesn’t know why it works and/or the pros/cons. The great electrician realizes that while it’s probably not the “correct” way, it saves a ton of cost and work and is sufficient for what is being requested.
My previous house was a new build. I had some weird electrical problems. I called the builder and they sent someone out.
The guy looked at my panel and said, “Oh yeah, I remember this house. We had to fire the electrician who wired your house because he was always showing up high.”
I had a new storm door installed through Lowe’s and the contractor they contracted to do it showed up real nice, we talked, then he went off and smoked meth and did the best fucking job I’ve ever seen.
50/50 I guess.
I had a gas stove installed by Lowe’s. The guys that installed it couldn’t figure out how to get the gas to stop leaking, but wouldn’t admit they had no idea what they were doing. They told me I would have to turn the gas valve off at the connection when I wasn’t using the stove
I stopped trying to explain and let them leave, because I was over it. Installed the connection myself, I was just happy I didn’t have to move it or the old one
I did call Lowe’s and let them know about it though, so that those guys wouldn’t inadvertently kill someone with their installations
50/50 for sure lol
Just install a barbeque lighter near the leak and set a timer to regularly light it and just flare off anything that has leaked since the previous flare. Then, when rebuilding after the fire, add a pressure sensor to the new setup that reduces the interval if the pressure increases beyond what it was when the interval was first calibrated.
Listen if all you’re doing is storm door build outs you get pretty good at it even when you’re smoking meth.
Actually I’m misremembering, he did the front door as well as the storm door.
Installed new trim and repaired some exterior wood rot he found and fixed the trim above the door so it would stop leaking lmao.
All those things were supposed to be extra charge but he just did them and that was that.
What’s fun is criticizing someone’s code and lack of proper comments/documentation, and then realizing you wrote it 3+ years ago.
Some days ago, I was complaining about some asinine decision on one of the systems I have to take care of with a programmer. The programmer then remembered that the thing I was complaining about was something that I asked to be added in the first place. He also reminded me of the why, but that knowledge simply made me wonder what the fucking fuck I was thinking back then.
The electrician equivalent is adding a 20A dedicated circuit along the wall and just snaking it all over the place through laziness (efficiency), and many moons later deciding to mount some tracks for a closet organizer but the voltage tester is freaking out like the wall is a game of Minesweeper
I work in municipal development. I was driving by and saw a hellscape development starting up and blocking traffic in the middle of Rush hour. So I pulled over, put on my City reflective vest, and went out to see who the hell authorized them for this bullshit.
They pulled out a permit with my signature on it.
I always tell every apprentice i work with that they need to make sure they weren’t the last guy to touch ut when they start bitching about the dumbass that came before them
