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Doug Miller

In article .com, wrote:
You are going to get a permit for this work and it will get inspected. Right?

1. the two low-ball estimates were proposing to do it without permits
or inspections. This was also a point of discomfort for me.

It should be. I bet they wanted payment in cash, too.

Anyone who is a qualified and licensed electrician should have no trouble
obtaining a permit, and need fear nothing from an inspection. "No permit"
should be understood as "unlicensed," which in turn implies "unqualified."

"No inspection" should be understood as "unqualified, and knows it."

Consider also that your electric utility company needs to be involved in this
process: the lines from the transformer to the meter base are almost certainly
2/0 aluminum to support the 150A service that they know you currently have.
An upgrade to 200A necessarily includes stringing new 4/0 wire from the
transformer to the meter base -- and they're probably going to want to see a
permit before they reinstall the meter.

I spoke
with one of these guys and asked about getting doing the work by
getting cable and going through the official process of permits,
inspections, etc. and was told that if I wanted to go that route his
price was going to be just a bit higher than the guy who gave me the
"expected" answer the first time.

So in addition to being neither licensed nor qualified, he's dishonest too.

2. I think one of my problems with this situation was that I knew too
much. My position with Siemens is the safety manager for our
industrial service group...our folks go out and work on 480V and
4,160V, and 13,800V industrial equipment.

No such thing as knowing too much. Your knowledge, and that of the people you
consulted at work, saved you from an unsafe installation.

3. The final factor that was in the back of my mind was the fact that
the house next door (built by the same developer) burnt to the ground
6 weeks ago in an apparent electrical system fire.

That could have any number of causes, though. If the house was more than a
couple years old, there's a good chance that the electrical system has seen
some modifications -- possibly by an unqualified homeowner, or maybe even by
one of the incompetent hacks that told you 2/0 aluminum was OK for 200A.

Like I said in my earlier post, the $3500 figure sounds a bit stiff to me. You
might want to solicit bids from one or two more qualified electricians or
contractors for comparison purposes, before you decide to go with that. But I
wouldn't have anything further to do with either of the lowballers.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.