Home Electrical Inspection Near You in Maryland
When you are looking to buy a new home in Maryland, an electrical safety inspection can help you make the most informed decision.
During the purchase process, a home inspection is one of the many requirements. The home inspector will go through the home to make sure everything is in order. The home must pass inspection before your settlement can take place. However, this inspection is limited, and most home inspectors are not licensed electricians.
On This Page:
- An Electrician's Role In The Buying and Selling Process
- Why Do You Need An Electrical Safety Inspection?
- Basic Electrical Safety Inspection
- Whole House Electrical Safety Inspection
- Common Repairs You Need an Electrician to Fix After A Real Estate Inspection
- What Our Happy Clients Say About Haas and Sons!
An Electrical Safety Inspection's Role In The Buying and Selling Process
As an electrician, I am often asked to perform electrical inspections and/or to fix the items on the home inspection report. Although a home inspector is trained to inspect homes and help buyers find any issues in the home before they go to settlement, many do not have a good electrical background and often miss important details. Also, most home inspectors don’t have the ability or the authority to fix the electrical problems they do come across.
In addition, while a home inspector may be able to tell you that the home is up to code, in many instances what they are telling you is that it is up to code for the time period in which it is built. This is because houses are grandfathered into the year the house was built and are not required to be up to code. However, there is a reason behind the updates to code. Most often it is because of safety. This is why it is a good idea to have a separate electrician safety inspection performed by a master electrician before settlement. We recommend that you have an inspection for safety, an inspection that doesn’t just tell you whether your home is up to code but whether your home is actually safe.
Why Do You Need Home Electrical Inspection?
In some instances, the home is simply aging, wires have heated up over the years, connections have loosened, and rust is setting in. However, the bigger issue we find is the trend towards DIY home improvements over the past decade. While many people are capable of making some minor changes, such as adding a fan or changing an outlet, some have bitten off more than they can chew. Often during these inspections, we find loose wires, open slices, or overloaded panel boxes. These are not necessarily found during the standard home inspection and can lead to shortages or worse yet fires down the road.
At Haas and Sons Electric, we perform two separate types of electrical inspection.
Basic Electrical Safety Inspection
Our basic electrical safety inspection is a service in which we make sure your safety devices meet current standards. This inspection includes checking your smoke detectors to make sure that they are not expired and are working correctly. If your smoke detectors are more than 10 years old they should be replaced. We can do this for you.
During this basic inspection, we also check that the GFCI protection in the kitchen, bathroom, outside, in the garage, basement, and any other areas near water are working correctly. In the case of outdoor outlets, we make sure they are still covered and that the waterproof cover is still doing its job.
And finally, we inspect your electric circuit panel. We look for rust, corrosion, and bare live wires. We check to make sure the panel is properly grounded and look for double tapped breakers, over-fused circuits, and that the wires are safely entering the panel and terminated.
Because electrical safety in MD is our focus every day we also check for anything else in your home that may indicate an electrical problem. This is where a trained eye can make all the difference.
Whole House Electrical Safety Inspection
The second sort of electrical safety inspection we perform is a whole house inspection. During a whole house inspection, we test every outlet to make sure it is working correctly. We test each GFCI outlet to ensure proper function and note any that are not in place.
We test all fixtures, including lights and fans to make sure they are working properly. We check the electrical circuit panel box for any signs of aging including rust and corrosion. We check that it is properly grounded. We check for proper terminations, make sure that the breaker size is in accordance with the wire size, check for double breakers, and check the condition of the main power cable.
Finally, we check the attic for wiring, open slices, missing junction boxes, improper terminations, and we check the recess lighting insulation.
With this inspection, we give the homeowner an official write-up of any and all issues that were found. However, if the homeowner is available at the time of the inspection, we feel it is important for them to see these issues firsthand. We make sure to show you exactly what we find as we find it.
When we buy a house we are buying so much more than the walls, the rooms, and a yard. We are buying a home for our families. We are buying comfort and security. Getting an electrical safety inspection prior to settlement can give you that peace of mind you might not otherwise have. Call us today to schedule your inspection - 443-396-2555.
Common Repairs You Need an Electrician to Fix After A Real Estate Inspection
Here are the top 9 items that commonly need to be addressed when selling a home.
- Outlets not grounded
- Reverse polarity of outlets
- Certify the electrical panel
- CSST flexible gas piping
- Double tapped neutrals
- Double tapped breaker
- Missing GFCI protection
- Aluminum wiring in the home
- Replace service cable from the street
Correcting Outlets That Are Not Grounded
All three-prong outlets are to be grounded, that's the round prong on a cord. This protects you from being shocked by a piece of equipment and allows plug-in surge protectors to work. Depending on the age of the home and how the wiring was installed, this varies in what the repairs look like. One on hand the electrical box may be grounded in which we will install a jumper wire from the box to the receptacle and sometimes there is no ground wire present in the wiring. For those cases, we can either re-wire that section with new wiring or install Ground Fault Protection (GFCI). If we install GFCI protection, then we must label the receptacles as “Ground Fault Protected, No Equipment Ground” to meet code requirements.
Backward Wiring - Reverse Polarity of Outlets
The reverse polarity of an outlet means the outlet was wired backward. Basically, the hot and negative (neutral) are on the wrong side of the outlet. We typically find this after a homeowner or handyman that didn’t know any better attempted to replace some of the outlets in the home. Outlets (receptacles) have two vertical slots and a circle hole in the ground. Luckily your appliances don’t care if the power is wired forward or backward, but it does pose an electrical shock hazard when wired backward. Also, some surge protectors and battery backups will not work properly when connected to reverse polarity.
Certification of An Old or Suspicious Electrical Panel
When we get this request it is almost always because the electrical panel is old, outdated, and or a known dangerous brand such as Federal Pacific Electric (FPE) or Zinzco. Electrical panels need to be replaced every 25-30 years to ensure that they are in good working order to protect you and your home. As they age different things can happen to them. Corrosion can set in, breaker can either not trip when they are supposed to or trip well before they need to. We also want to make sure that the system is properly grounded. Over time, these grounding methods have changed a bit. Old grounding can deteriorate over time or be accidentally removed during a renovation or repair.
FPE and Zinzo are two brands of electrical panels that have been deemed unsafe and FPE even lost its safety rating (product listing) due to falsifying the tests. Both of these brands are well known for the breakers not tripping at all when there is too much electricity being used. For example, a 15 amp breaker should trip shortly after 18 amps of electricity is being used. These brands can often allow well over 25 amps of electrical before tripping off. This leads to wires and connections overheating and catching fire.
If you have an FPE or Zinzo contact us today for a free quote to make your home safer. Contact us immediately.
Grounding CSST Flexible Gas Piping
CSST is yellow flexible gas piping that is used to provide gas to your appliances such as water heater, furnace, stove, fireplace, and more.
- Why do I need to ground the CSST?
CSST is known for cracking, breaking, or even exploding when there is a nearby lightning strike. A lightning strike can cause a surge through the gas piping system. We have to ground the gas system so that surge is properly grounded out and does not damage the structural integrity of the CSST piping system. - Where do you ground CSST?
The best place is at the gas meter. The next acceptable place is if there is a gas manifold (diverter) or a change over from hard pipe to flexible. This ground wire must be run to the nearest electrical panel, with preference to the main electrical panel if you happen to have sub-panels.
Fixing Double Tapped Neutrals
A double-tapped neutral is when you have more than one wire under a screw terminal on the neutral bar. This is a direct infraction with the manufacture of the electrical panel. Every manufacturer states you may only have one neutral wire per screw terminal. Having multiple wires under one terminal can lead to overheating, connection becoming loose, and is a danger when servicing the electrical panel.
Repairing Double Tapped Breakers
A double-tapped breaker is when you have more than one wire attached to the breaker. Each wire should be on its own circuit breaker. When they are double-tapped, you have two separate circuits sharing one breaker which can lead to overloading, nuisance tripping, and/or overheating. Currently, Square D is the only manufacturer that is designed to allow (2) wires to be installed on some of their breakers.
The double tapped breaker issue is fixed by installing additional breakers in your electrical panel and separating the wiring so that there is only one wire per circuit breaker. In some cases, if the panel is full we may be able to use tandem breakers. Unfortunately, not all panels allow for these breakers. In rare cases, we may have to look at other solutions to correct this issue.
Placing Missing GFCI protection
Ground fault circuit interrupts or GFCI protection is required near all water sources and unfinished areas. This includes areas like the kitchen, bathroom, exterior, utility room, garage, and basement. Many older homes, pre-1978 don’t have any GFCI protection at all since it wasn’t required back then. Now we have to identify the areas that are required by electrical code and install either GFCI receptacles or breakers.
Street-To-Meter Service Cable Replacement
Your service cable is the wire coming from your power provider, to the meter, and inside to the electrical panel. For BGE residents, the homeowner owns all the cabling coming from the meter can- the wire going to the electrical panel and if you have wire going up the peak of your home. For Pepco residents, you also own the meter can. So if that needs replacing, you’re on the hook for it too.
Over years of being outside these cables become weathered, they crack, dry-rot, deteriorate, corrode, and sometimes they allow water to drip into the electrical panel itself.
If your cable is cracking, it’s time to have it replaced. We do need to pull a county permit and involve the power company to perform this replacement. The whole process from start to finish can take several weeks depending on the power company’s turnaround time. So if you can see yours needs to be replaced, do it now so that it doesn’t possibly hold up your closing.
If you're looking for a home electrical inspection in Maryland, or if you need some things corrected after an inspection - let the highly-rated team of expert electrical contractors near you at Haas and Sons help. Contact us today for an estimate!
What a Happy Client Says About Haas and Sons on Google
Alex was a great tech, was helpful and informative. Laid out all the options I needed to get the inspection repairs completed. Cleared the schedule to get my job completed right away. Great experience overall.
Lee H.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
