Electrical inspection — and who should be doing it

Establishing which inspection you are buying

Pre-purchase due diligence, an insurance-driven assessment, a pre-renovation capacity survey and a municipal sign-off of permitted work are four different products. The first three you commission; the fourth is triggered by a permit and performed by the jurisdiction. Saying which one you need is the fastest way to get the right person and the right price.

Watch for: A quote that does not ask why you want it. The scope of a capacity survey and the scope of a safety assessment barely overlap.

The service and panel

The panel comes off and the assessment starts there: service size, panel make and condition, breaker sizing against conductor sizing, double-tapped breakers, signs of overheating, the main bonding arrangement, and how much spare capacity exists. This is the part a general home inspector often cannot do to the same depth, because opening and assessing a live panel is trade work.

Watch for: An inspection performed without the panel cover coming off. Most of what matters is behind it.

Branch wiring and what the house is actually made of

Sampling in the attic, the basement, the crawlspace and behind a selection of device plates establishes what wiring types are present — modern cable, mid-century cloth-covered cable, aluminium branch circuits, live knob-and-tube — and whether earlier work was done to a decent standard. Mixed-era houses are the norm, not the exception.

Watch for: A report that names the house's build year and infers the wiring from it. Many houses have been partly rewired, and many have not been rewired where you would expect.

Devices, grounding and protection

Receptacles are tested for correct wiring and grounding, ground-fault and arc-fault devices are checked where present and their absence noted where current code would expect them, and the grounding electrode system is assessed. Smoke and carbon monoxide alarm coverage is usually noted too.

Watch for: Ungrounded three-prong outlets — a two-prong receptacle replaced with a three-prong one on an ungrounded circuit. It is common, it is invisible without a tester, and it defeats the safety assumption of everything you plug in.

The report, and what you do with it

A useful report separates the genuinely unsafe from the merely non-current, and puts the findings in priority order with an indication of effort. Age alone is not a defect, and a report that lists every deviation from current code with equal weight is not decision-useful.

Watch for: A report that is really a quote. If every finding maps to a service the inspecting company sells, you have bought a sales call with a document attached.