this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.
Kinda depends? But yeah they're mostly separate.
When I worked for a shop (self-employed now), they had us divided into Construction and Service, and the two pretty much kept to themselves. Service guys looked down on Construction guys because they didn't know much about troubleshooting; Construction guys looked down on Service guys because most of them couldn't build their way out of a wet paper bag.
Most of my experience as an apprentice was construction. I did some service calls now and then when jobsites slowed down in the winter. Now I mostly do service calls, and, frankly, it's a HELL of a lot easier.
Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.
The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!
Yeah I don't envy drywallers. That is exhausting work, especially since a lot of them get paid by the sheet. There's a running joke in construction about them constantly leaving soda bottles full of piss because they can't take the time to go to the john.
Electrical construction (I mostly did commercial fwiw, but dabbled in residential and industrial as well) can be pretty rough too. Other than the brief time I worked with the union, you're pretty much expected to bust ass all day every day, forever. It was... not fun, most of the time.
But you're right on the last point too - once you really understand the system, most faults can be tracked down and figured out pretty quickly. After all, electricity is basically binary - either the circuit works, or it doesn't, in which case you just keep following it back to the part where it does work, and now you can find the problem.
It's not always that simple, like if multiple circuits are sharing a neutral, or you've just got a loose neutral connection... but as you may guess, if you've got power where you're supposed to but the thing still won't work, the problem is the neutral. So... it's still kinda simple lol. There's only so many parts to a circuit after all.
And then of course you have those rare issues where the fault is actually dangerous! Just a few years ago I called an electrician to my house because the breaker for the laundry room light fixtures was tripping every time, so I suspected a short. The electrician who showed up (hell of a guy, loved to chat!) said the ceiling light fixture was wired incorrectly and the housing was live! A quick and easy fix for him but anyone changing a lightbulb on that socket over the past 30 years was risking a shock!
Of course this is only 120V AC so not the deadliest thing in the world, but it’s always fascinated me that a fault can go unnoticed for many many years and still pose a hazard. It’s kind of like WW2 munitions or something, but completely unintentional!
If a live wire was touching the chassis and tripping the breaker likely because the chassis was grounded that would mean it's wired correctly though. Unless like a neutral broke off and touched the live chassis causing the overload?
He said live and neutral were reversed. The ground connection to the chassis was correct though!
Ahh I see. By housing you just meant the screw portion of an edison socket.
Sounds like the elevator trade, too
Repair electricians definitely run into the work of install electricians, but my experience is they're mostly two different groups. Install electricians may come back to do repairs on their own work, or if there's a lull in new construction jobs they can pick up they might fill in the hours with some smaller repair jobs.
There are some some more specialized electricians that do a mix of both, for example my company is mostly generator focused. We're involved in both new construction and repairs for things that are generator/transfer switch/solar related.
That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?
Right, I'm fully licensed as an electrician but I also have to repair/maintain natural gas/propane/diesel engines. There's also increasing amounts of computer/network knowledge needed for new controllers and setting up network monitoring. Overall it's a job that really benefits from a lot of different skill sets, and has a lot of day to day variety in the work I'm doing.