If your home is in need of some electrical work, you’re going to need the help of a great electrician that can perform residential electric services. However, if you’ve never worked with one before, it can be hard finding an electrician that you can trust.
Thankfully, there are some things you can do to weed out the bad electricians from the good.
In fact, if you keep reading, you’ll learn exactly what you can do to find the right electrician for your needs.
Let’s begin!
Check their Credentials
When you’re looking to hire an electrician, you can avoid hiring a bad one, by checking their credentials ahead of time.
Firstly, you want to check if they are licensed. If an electrician is licensed, it shows they have undergone the proper training needed to be an electrician.
If you want to check if an electrician is licensed, you can use specialist, state-owned websites to learn more. These websites will have a section that allows you to input a license number. When you do this, the website will tell you if the license is valid or not.
You will also want to check if an electrician has insurance. This will help protect you and your home, in the event of an accident. It will also ensure your electrician is protected too.
Most electricians will have a certificate that lets you check their insurance status. You can always reach out to an insurance company to double check if the insurance is valid.
It also helps to check if an electrician is ‘bonded’ too. A lot of the time, electricians will provide a ‘bond’ in exchange for receiving their license. This bond can then be paid out to people if the electrician abandons a project after doing subpar work.
You can check if an electrician is bonded, by using the state-owned websites we mentioned earlier.
Look for Reviews
Reviews are a great way to learn how an electrician dealt with past customers. If you want to find reviews based on a specific electrician, such as Puckett Electric, you can do so by searching for their company on Google.
In some cases, you will see their reviews directly within the search results. If you don’t see any reviews here, check out some 3rd party review sites. Your ability to find reviews will often depend on where the electrician asks for reviews to be left.
They might even have a social media presence you can use to find reviews.
When reading reviews, try to find reviews from people who needed help with projects similar to yours. These kinds of reviews will give you the best insight into how good an electrician is at residential electric services.
If you are not able to find any reviews, you can always ask for references. An experienced electrician should be able to provide with the contact details of past customers.
You can contact these past customers to gain some insight into how good the electrician is. You can also learn if the electrician’s work has stood the test of time.
Get Multiple Quotes
When it comes to residential electric services, it can be tough working out what is a fair price and what isn’t. You can avoid being overcharged, by speaking to a number of different electricians and obtaining multiple quotes. After 3-5 quotes, you will get a good sense of what a fair price is.
You may find that different electricians use different methods of billing. One electrician might bill by the hour and another might bill by the project.
Even if an electrician has a low hourly rate, you need to be careful.
It can be hard to work out how long a project is going to last. If the project becomes quite complicated, the hours can quickly rack up. This can mean that the bill would exceed what you’d otherwise pay if you arranged a ‘project fee’ instead.
If you want to keep expectations clear, try to obtain a project fee, as opposed to an hourly fee.
You also need to be careful about working with someone who has priced their services significantly lower than all of the other electricians. Such electricians may be cutting corners somewhere, in order to preserve their margin.
They may be hiring untrained labor or they might be using subpar tools. Electrical work done wrong can be dangerous. While it can be tempting to go for the lowest offer, remember you often get what you pay for.
Ask About Aftercare For Residential Electric Services
When you are thinking about working with an electrician, ask about aftercare. There is a rare chance that some part of your electrical system might not work properly after the electrician has done their work.
If there are any issues, you need to find out if the electrician will come back and fix what is not working. You need to find out if they will come out for free to fix errors on any residential electrical services work they have done.
It’s also important to find out how long they will take to visit your home, once you’ve reported the issue. If they offer free aftercare, but state that work will be done within a 7-day window – that might be too long.
Excellent Electrician?
If you need help with residential electric services, you’re going to need the help of an excellent electrician. However, it can be hard to find a trusted electrician that you can rely on to do the work.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the steps you can take to find an electrician that you can trust. Checking the credentials of an electrician is a great way to learn how well trained an electrician is.
You can also use reviews to help you learn how past clients felt about the work carried out by the electrician in question.
What matters most, though, is that you are thorough when vetting potential electricians. If you are, you’ll be able to avoid the common problems people face, when it comes to hiring an electrician for residential electric services.
Want to learn more about how you can find reliable businesses? Check out our blog to learn more.