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House Wiring Hello! I'm new to this list, but you may know Meg, my wife. We have a
house in Arlington, in which I'd like to do some electrical work. I want
to do the work myself, but my initial attempts to ask the electrical inspector
about permits and such were stonewalled with "your electrician will get
the permits." If anyone has experience as a do-it-yourselfer dealing with
the electrical inspector, I'd love to hear about it Do-it-yourselfer types doing electrical work in arlington (in particular,
i'm not sure about other towns) generally don't bother with permits... So what is the dividing line between needing a permit and not? I haven't bothered to pull one when I rewired my detached garage (breaker, new buried conduit, outlets, lights & switches, ~150' romex), but that may have been enough to warrant a permit. OTOH, I felt silly getting one for the 6" eave extensions on the garage roof. I think you can get a permit retroactively and have it inspected, can't
you? Presuming the work is up to snuff and permit-able. I went through this in Somerville: there, at least, you have to have an electrician's license to get a permit. Electricians are *supposed* to get permits for just about everything, I think, but they often don't. Our real-estate lawyer, who also owns a house in Somerville, couldn't find a single electrical permit ever recorded for her house although several generations of wiring had obviously been installed to replace the original gas lighting! I asked the Somerville housing inspector (anonymously) if they could inspect and approve a homeowner's job after the fact, and he said no, you have to have a permit first to get the inspector there. He didn't have an answer for why it wasn't a good idea to inspect amateur jobs, when wiring supplies were clearly being marketed to homeowners at Despot and people were obviously doing their own wiring. I can just imagine the inspector poking his head into my front hall and announcing, "I am shocked, shocked, to discover wiring going on here!" If you choose to do your own wiring, make sure you do as good a job as any licensed electrician would, since you could be in very deep shit if anything goes wrong -- if the house catches fire from faulty, illegally installed wiring, at best your insurance company won't give you a dime (at worst someone could get hurt). That said, I've seen some criminally shoddy and incompetent work done by licensed electricians, as well as excellent work. It's possible to do good work yourself but there's more to know than just putting things together in the "obvious" way or copying existing installations. I recommend getting a good textbook or two and a copy of the applicable electrical code (e.g. Mass electrical code). The Taunton Press book _Wiring_a_House_ looked excellent, but amb borrowed it before I could finish it. Keep in mind there's much more to know than Ohm's law. Many of the rules of house wiring are intended to keep the wiring system intact and safe from abrasion, vibration, and mechanical stress, since it will be in place for decades. Wiring failures can easily start fires (as well as shock or electrocute people) so be sure you know how to do the job safely and correctly, or else have a good electrican do it. You can always post here about specific problems and questions, e-j is full of amateur electricans and Klingon Wirers who love to expostulate. --Mad About Plaid |
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