Commercial electrical contracting

What commercial work covers here

The work falls into three groups. There is capacity: the service entrance, the panels and the feeders. There is the build itself: fit outs, remodels, additions, lighting, equipment connections and the outside of the property. And there is service work after everyone has moved in, which is where most of our longest relationships started.

The commercial stock in this region is not office towers. It is retail units, small offices, warehouses, restaurants, workshops and light industrial bays, very often in a building that was something else first. That history matters more than the square footage. A shell from the seventies with an addition from the nineties holds three generations of wiring, no drawings and a directory written in pencil by somebody who left years ago.

Which of the three you are in changes what matters. On capacity work the long pole is the utility and the lead time on gear. On a build it is the other trades and the inspection sequence. On service work it is how fast somebody can tell you what is actually wrong, which usually depends on whether the last electrician left a record.

Working while the doors are open

A remodel inside a trading business is a different problem from an empty shell. The store still opens at nine and the warehouse still ships, so most of that work gets done early, late or on a Sunday, with temporary supplies wherever a circuit has to come out for longer than a shift.

What actually decides how disruptive it is has nothing to do with skill. It is whether anybody knows what each breaker feeds. In an older commercial building the directory is usually wrong, so every isolation turns into a hunt and somebody's till or walk in freezer goes dark by accident. We re-identify circuits as we go and leave a schedule that matches reality, for the reasons set out in why your panel schedule does not match the building. If nobody can explain how the building is fed any more, how distribution is arranged in a building is the place to start.

Capacity, lighting and the outside of the building

A change of use is where capacity runs out. A retail unit that becomes a restaurant, or a warehouse that takes on a production line, adds load the original service was never calculated for. The answer starts with an Article 220 load calculation, and it may be a sub panel, a new feeder or a whole new service. That decision is worked through on the service upgrades page, and what a panel room rebuild involves is shown in this feeder and panel room job.

Lighting is the part of a building people judge without knowing why. A warehouse is a layout problem before it is a fixture problem, because aisle racking turns a good lumen package into shadows, which is the point of choosing and laying out high bay LED and of this warehouse retrofit. Outside, a dark lot is a liability question as much as a lighting one, and the poles need trenching before the asphalt is sealed, as in the parking lot lighting job.

EV charging is now a routine line item on a fit out, for a fleet or as an amenity. It is also the load most likely to embarrass a service that was already near its limit, so it belongs in the load calculation at design stage rather than after the equipment arrives. The practical side is on the EV charging page.