> $40-60k for an electrician to wire the house.
Think I'm in the wrong profession, what on earth does a Californian electrician make per year? At that rate I'd guess 500K+
Think I'm in the wrong profession, what on earth does a Californian electrician make per year? At that rate I'd guess 500K+
Wiring a simple / small home, it takes well over four electrician months, minimum.
Also, they have to pay licensing fees to the state, insurance premiums, etc, etc.
Of course, the $40-60K also includes materials, which are a small percentage of the cost, but non-zero.
My parents place was new, custom construction (not small, but only 3BR/3Ba) and there were 2 sparkies there for 1 day to set the temporary power, 4 or 5 days to rough the house in and, after drywall, they were back for 3 or 4 days to trim everything out.
One day we showed up, and all of the electrical had been done. Power, internet, pre-wired home alarm, panels, the whole kit. Plumbing was the same way. One day, plumbing. (It uses that flexible plastic tubing internally, that has to go up fast.)
Did I see it being done? No. For all I know 50 folks showed up and wired it in a day. "2 man months". But, I'm guessing that's not what happened.
The most interesting anecdote from this is that I actually met one of the guys that did the work. He did, at least part of, the internet wiring.
Know how I met him? He was driving a dump truck delivering landscaping material. He liked the work better, I guess his family owned the hauling business.
I don't know what he was getting paid to route CAT 6 cable, but, apparently, all told, driving a dump truck is better.
What exactly does the electrician spend all that time doing in California?
Amusingly enough you can add a separate 100 amp service arial if you convert to a duplex even if just on paper ...
It’s hard to take these numbers seriously - they don’t pass the sniff test for anyone who has had it done. Wiring a 1000sq ft home is a job that is measured in days, not months. While I only have experience of the UK, it is difficult to see any possible regulation which would mean installation being quite literally an order of magnitude slower.
But let’s use some Fermi estimation. California builds around 100,000 new houses a year, give or take. This suggests we’d need an absolute minimum of 400,000 electrician-months a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks there are 70,000 electricians in California in total. Assuming they have an availability of 90%, then we could say that California has about 750,000 available electrician-months a year in total.
This would mean that over half of all available electrician time in California would be spent wiring new-build houses, if we assumed they were all small properties. It seems clear this can’t be a credible result.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, but it’s hard to swallow without some idea of what possible thing could cause this betone vague hints about “code being insane“
Recent example, upgrade to fire doors in corridors on 3 floors. Halfway into the job they realise each corridor is a different height and the doors they have already bought are the wrong size. Some levels of incompetance are hard to imagine until you see it happening in real time.
This was in Southern California.