The question really is, should that person, electrician or not, give you advice over the phone?
This just happened the other day. A caller asked to speak with an electrician. Like we are 1-800-freeadviceforelectricalproblems. Okay, I know that’s way too many numbers. Anyway, he called and said he installed a 3-way switch and it wasn’t working. Could we tell him which wire goes where?
I’m like, but I can’t see your switch. What colour are the wires? Actually, that is not what I said. What I did say was, “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s just not appropriate for us to give you electrical advice over the phone. We’d be happy to come out and fix it for you though.” He agreed. It turned out when the electrician visited, that the wires to the switch were installed backwards and in the process, the customer blew the switch, which happened to be a $40 timer switch, not a $5 thingy. Our electrician got a new timer and installed it correctly, so all is well now, but that mistake cost the customer more than it should have for his small project.
The moral of this story is, more than you’d expect, it saves money to hire professionals to do the job right. I can’t even count how many times this sort of thing has happened. We are constantly fixing homeowner mistakes. Really. And getting rich doing it. Just kidding. We are definitely not getting rich from that.
So, we won’t give you electrical advice over the phone (well maybe just a little, but only about breakers and GFCIs tripping), but we will book a service call. Get in touch with the professionals at Barr Electric. Our motto is quite literally Doing It Right!! Because that’s what we do. Now scroll to the bottom of the page for our contact info and pop us a message.
