Electrician
How to find the best electrician for electrical work on your home.
When it comes to electrical work on your home, it doesn’t matter if it’s a quick fix to replace a few lights or switches in your kitchen, or a complete and dangerous rewiring of your entire home, you want to know you’re hiring the most capable and best electrician for the job.
This is because electrical work is some of, if not the most important work that you can have done in your home. Simply because mistakes made during this type of work can mean danger for you and the people you love that live in your home. This makes finding the best electrician one of the most important parts of your tradesman search.
We took some time to speak with some of our most experienced tradesmen on ClickATrades to find out the things you need to be looking for when meeting with potential electricians for work on your home:
- Research
- Verify their experience and qualifications.
- Get at least three detailed quotes.
- Plan for them to follow up on the job after it’s completed.
If you’re being certain to look for these things, then you are well on your way to ensuring that you’re hiring the best electrician for work on your home.
Research
We know that there’s no way to become an expert in home electrical systems after doing a few hours or days of research at home, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t educate yourself enough to be able to decipher if the tradesman you hire knows what he’s doing. Knowing a bit about home electrical systems will also give you the ability to more accurately explain what’s going on with your home electrical to any potential electricians you’re meeting with.
Verify their experience and qualifications
There are many different types of tradesmen that work on your home who’s work or professional experience you may not be able to verify with formal qualifications. But electricians do not fall under that category because there are a certain set of industry standards and practices that they are under and that you should be looking out for.
Every part of electrical work in your home, whether a simple repair, or a full rewiring must be done in accordance with legal standards. And in some cases, like a rewiring job, must also be:
- Approved by the Building Control department of your local jurisdiction. Or;
- Done by a tradesman registered with a competent person scheme, who is qualified to self-certify their work.
This is because all electrical work must be done safely, and ensured that it will not pose any threat or danger to you or anyone in your home. If electrical work is not done right, and also not repaired, it can also mean that you will face trouble selling your home because you will not have the correct electrical safety certificates.
You will want to ensure that you’re hiring an electrician that is qualified as well as registered with the following competent person schemes. Which means they will be able to issue you a certificate of compliance upon completion of the job, and they will also deal with Building Control on your behalf.
- BSI
- ELECSA
- NAPIT
- STROMA
- NICEIC
- SELECT
- TrustMark
You are also able to verify if a potential electrician is licensed through the Electrical Safety First website.
Get at least three detailed quotes
We recommend this for every profession. Most importantly for when you’re looking to hire an electrician to do work on your home. Not only will you want to ensure that you fully and completely research their licenses and qualifications, but you want to make sure that they come out to your home to give you a detailed line by line quote for the work.
This way you’re able to see which tradesmen, are lowering their prices just to win the job. Which means they will probably try to make up costs in other areas throughout the process, whether it be materials or labour. Review each of the quotes side by side and compare costs. You want to be sure that you’re also looking to see what materials they will be using for your job. Also, are they subcontracting out any part of the work on your home?
Plan for a follow up with them after the job is completed
It’s important to be sure that any electrician you hire will do a complete walk-through of all of the work done in your home after they finish. This way you can see firsthand what they’ve done as well and how it all came out.
These are just a few of the most important things you should be looking for when meeting with potential electricians to do work in your home. You can find listings and more information about our most highly-reviewed tradesmen on the ClickATrades electrician listings.