Inspections
ESA Inspections and Safety Reports
Booked because a lender, an insurer or a purchase agreement asked for it. Usually on a deadline, usually on an older building.
Almost nobody books an electrical inspection because they woke up curious. It is asked for by an insurer at renewal, by a lender before closing, or by a buyer whose home inspector wrote the words "recommend evaluation by a licensed electrical contractor".
What the request usually means
The three requests behind most of this work are a fuse panel, suspected knob-and-tube or aluminium branch wiring, and an unpermitted alteration found during a sale. Each needs a different document, and getting the wrong one is the most common reason the deadline is missed and the work has to be repeated.
An inspection is not the same as a certificate
A contractor’s written assessment of a building’s wiring and an Electrical Safety Authority certificate of inspection on a filed notification of work are two different things. Insurers usually want the first. Lenders and municipalities frequently want the second, and the second only exists where work was filed and inspected. If a previous owner did work without filing it, no report can retroactively create that record, and the honest answer is a notification covering the remediation.
What we will tell you not to spend money on
Two-prong outlets in a grounded house can often be corrected with ground-fault protection and correct labelling rather than a rewire. A panel that is merely full is not a panel that is unsafe, and a subpanel is frequently the cheaper answer. Where either applies, the report says so.
Talk to a Midland electrical contractor
Tell us the town, roughly when the building was put up, and what the panel looks like — fuses or breakers, and the number on the main. Those three things decide whether you are looking at an afternoon, a scheduled job, or a conversation with your distributor first, and they are usually enough to price it without anybody driving anywhere.