Boy, that’s the fastest $2800 I ever spent!
Electricians Charge a Hell of a Lot
We got a few recommendations from friends and neighbors in the area for electricians they’ve used. We avoided the larger electrician “companies” since the overhead is higher and you don’t know who you’re going to have in your house for 2 days. Of our individual electricians in the area, 3 of them got high marks, so we had all 3 out to give us quotes on the various jobs we were interested in. Interestingly, as though they were all reading each others’ minds, they all quoted at roughly the same (seemingly expensive!) prices. When I backed out my assumed costs of lighting, wiring and other materials, I pegged their hourly rates at about $150/hour. That’s a damn good rate! With most doctors making $150,000-$250,000/year (not to mention they tend to work a heck of a lot more than 40 hours a week and start off with 6 figures in med school debt), I’ve come to the conclusion that electricians make more than doctors….
Judge for Yourself if Electricians Make More than Doctors
People in the skilled trades have always earned relatively high hourly rates. The struggle for many of them is to get year round, full time hours on a consistent basis.
hahahahaha.
Here’s the old joke, used to think this was funny, not so much anymore.
The neurosurgeon gets called home from the OR because his pipes under his sink have burst and water is shooting all over the kitchen. (The neurosurgeon’s trophy wife has no idea how to turn the house water off, lol.)
His plumber comes immediately, turns off the water main and fixes the problem. Takes him about 1 hour.
His bill comes to a cool $2000, $500 of which was for “emergency service”.
The neurosurgeon blows a gasket. “Fuck!!!”, he yells. “I am a fucking neurosurgeon and on call for the fucking trauma center and I (King of the Medical World) don’t make that kind of money in 1 hour and for emergencies!!!.
The plumber sighs and says, “Neither did I when I practiced neurosurgery”.
Bada-Boom.
Bob is correct.
Now Darwin can wire it up himself…
Cry me a fucking river.
You earn what you can get.
Without electricity, you can’t watch Jersey Shore, American Idol, and all the shows about food.
People give two shits about their health, well, more like one. People pay for what they value. Your poor health and obesity is somebody else’s problem, but not being able to watch “Man versus Food” is a real personal problem.
As one of the few actual electricians floating around in this turdbowl… $150/hr is cheap. What really gets me every single damn time is that the ethereal skill of determining which color wire does what combined with a history of not starting too many fires is viewed as a skillset akin to deciphering Sumerian cuneiform tablets by the general populace. Guys, I’ll spell it out for ya, ‘k?
White = You will get shocked.
Black = You will get shocked.
Green = You will not get shocked.
Red or any other colors that come up = Read the goddamned directions first, dumbass.
When repairing/building plugs: White goes to silver. Black goes to gold (because blacks always like gold.) Green goes to green. Once again, if red or another color is there, read the fucking directions that came with whatever you’re trying to wire. Most recent appliances will have a wiring diagram on them, not just in the books that you lost or forgot to get from the craigslist guy.
Oh, and I saved it til last just in case there’s some of you fuckers out there that don’t read ALL the instructions before starting… turn off the breaker before beginning work. (So, who got their dick knocked in the dirt because they didn’t turn off the breaker first?)
I cut a live wire in the attic and almost fell through the ceiling ala Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation. I now hire people to do all electiric work.
@eclip: LOL, I live your Wiring for Dummies approach. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that 99% of Americans don’t even know where their breaker box is or how to turn off the power!!!!!
You’ll laugh at this. We have a 60KW generator that will run our entire place in the event of a prolonged power shortage. (And probably the entire neighborhood for that matter, lol.) It is not automatically hooked in so has to be hooked up with ginormous cables to the breaker boxes. These cables are the largest caliber possible to carry the largest amount of current, are copper and are heavy, bulky and thoroughly a pain in the ass to move about.
So hubby and I go out to “test the system” one day last summer. It was about 100 in the shade and here we are dragging these cables around to the two breaker boxes. These things weigh about 100 pounds EACH. We also at this juncture decided we would color code the cables. Yeah, what a great idea!! This meant you had to trace the cable back from the box to the end to make sure you labelled the ends correctly. (Which we did, double and triple checking.)
So, we have it all hooked up, we are about to have fucking heat stroke, we throw the switch on the generator – and we forgot to put fuel in it!!!!
There is still a little mushroom cloud of swear words swirling over our place.
(It did work, perfectly, and nothing blew up but gawd what a bother!!)
Yep… those 1/0 feeder cables are a pain in the nuts. One of my first gigs after leaving the employ of Her Majesty’s Navy (Hillary) was at a concert lighting place. All our dimmer racks used 100ft 5-conductor feeder cables for power. Some shows had four or more dimmers and guess who got to lug all that shit around in the summer, wearing all black, twice a day throughout a tour? Yep, you guessed it, the FNG – me.
I still want that job back, though. Where else could you get written up for NOT splitting a joint with the warehouse manager at lunch?
Another thing I must thank my parents for is telling me that you can never have too many skills. About the only thing I can’t do around my house is change the zoning. I put a new roof on it over the winter, put in a new AC unit and re-plumbed my water softener and clothes washer so it no longer goes into my septic system. I do sometimes hire someone to do the jobs I don’t really care to do, but can’t think of one thing I can’t do myself. And to think I was a high school dropout with only 1 year of school for AC and Refrigeration.
I read Strauss and Howes 4th turning and now I know everything including electrical.
If you dont know where the circuit breaker is and want to kill the power just touch the black and white wires together or stick a paperclip in the socket.
~~~
Kidding. I never made near what these electricians did even though I have a FAA license and experienced on DC8, DC9, MD80, 707, 727, 737, 757 and KC-135 with training certs on nearly all of them.
Then again you need a hangar, jacks and lots of tooling to work on these beasts so you cant really go self-employed.
@Kill Bill: WOW! You can fly all those planes??? That is really super cool. Learning to fly is one of the items on my bucket list. My brother worked his way up through the pilot ranks in the late 70s early 80s, without military training, and now flies Embrear jets. He was in training for the 737s when 9/11 hit and the entire airline industry tanked. From which it has never recovered. He likes the smaller planes, actually. You go dude!
@Admin: How appropriate that you have a dumbass cat. Didn’t you have to tear down a wall to get it out? Like owner, like cat, LOL. BTW: Your work boots look way way too new. Not near enough scuffs or stains. Avalon clearly has been going way tooooo easy on the honey-do list.
I only had to cut a big enough hole in the drywall to let the dumbass cat out. The wire didn’t look like it was live until I cut it and blew out the electricity in the whole house.
“We have a 60KW generator that will run our entire place in the event of a prolonged power shortage”
@Hope: you have an aluminum smelter at your house? WTF on earth do you need 60kw for?
We can run everything important at our house on 5kw. Not every last thing we own, but everything we really need for a prolonged outage. Even if you have a monster a/c unit I can’t see more than maybe 20kw tops. Are you running that superconducting supermonkeycollider there?
I actually saw a van with the best slogan ever. It said, “xyz Electricians – Hire us Now and Pay Less Than What It Will Cost to Fix Your Husband’s Mistakes”
I’m sure the wives can relate
Hope – I think KB’s a mechanic-type like me (and on almost the same list of A/C, interestingly enough). Airplane electrical is WAY more fun than house electrical. All our wires are white. The older birds were nice enough to add an ‘N’ to the end of the wire number to let you know it was a ground. Some of the recent aircraft I’ve been on didn’t feel it was necessary to have such a feature, so you’re left with sifting through multi-thousand page wiring diagrams to figure out what it was that you just accidentally cut or ran a drill bit through… Did I mention all the wires look the same? And that the wire numbers are usually either very light gray with tiny-ass numbers and letters OR, and even better, worn away or ruined by oil/fuel/hydraulic fluid contamination altogether? Best of all, wages have been absolutely STAGNANT since the mid-90’s!!! Ain’t it great to be responsible for thousands of lives every day you go to work knowing that a manager at McShits makes more than you do?
I remember hiring a guy to replace the fuel pump on my boat (a 1956 chris craft). The next day my now ex-wife and I drove it to the annual Antique and Classic Boat Society show, downtown. Upon returning to the dock, during my typical shut down prodedure, I noticed something in the bilge water. It was gasoline. The fucker had pinched the gas line between the pump and the engine and gas had been squirting out all day. Good thing there wasn’t a spark or we and the boat would have gone up in a fireball.
Ya’ll must have forgot what it felt like after sticking your weenie into an electric fence, or else you would leave the wiring to the professionals.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve “coded” in the ER that have been shocked, especially while working on their air conditioner (98% died). Don’t do it, man.
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An old departed friend from Cherribusco, Indiana taught me everything I needed to know about plumbing and electricity.
Max Allman quote: “Hot water on the left – Cold water on thr right. S__t won’t go up hill,
2 wires – Hookem up, 3 wires F___em up.
Always remove the ground wire from a car battery when removing,
always install the positive wire first when installing the battery.”
Here is an oldie but a goodie…Jim and electrical work….
@Persnickety: Yes, I have a 60KW generator. I am DIY on uranium enrichment and those centrifuges are real electricity hogs. Of course, I am enriching uranium for medical purposes, the thought of constructing a tactical nuclear weapon would NEVER cross my mind!!!! And you wonder why there are drones deployed in Montgomery, Tx, lol.
Seriously, my husband believes that there is no upper limit to the size of heavy equipment that could or should be purchased. To run our 2 big commercial wells, shop, 4 deep freezers and 3 refrigerators, and, of course, keep the AC running at full blast in the house and shop, he thought this is what we needed. ***eyes rolling*** Come Armageddon all my neighbors will have their refrigerators on my front lawn, plugged into my generator. That is the Redneck version of being prepared, heh.
@elciptix: Every time someone with boots on the ground in the airline industry tells me what REALLY goes on in the maintenance of airplanes, it reinforces my decision to fly as little as possible. Gahhh!
@Admin: Let a voltometer enter your life and eliminate those pesky electrical mishaps.
Admin said: “The wire didn’t look like it was live until I cut it”
LOL! That is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. The only wires I ever saw that looked “live” were either on fire or headed that way.
I_S
Admin says: “. The wire didn’t look like it was live until I cut it and blew out the electricity in the whole house.” Damn, now that is funny. Dumb, but funny. Admin risks life and limb by basing his determinations on whether electric lines are live on how they look. Hey – this one looks live! Hey, this one looks dead!
What, eeny meanie minie moe is to damn hard for you, so instead you use the “looks live/dead” system? Bwahahahahaha!
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Sorry IS – I missed your post. You beat me to it. Good thing he has a career that keeps him away from sharp, pointy objects.
@Hope, I’m probably preaching to the choir here but have you factored the fuel consumption of that 60kw generator and how much fuel you actually store? I forget the exact number but I believe we only keep on hand 3 days’ of continuous operation for our little 5kw, and that would be if we prioritized it over everything else that uses gasoline. Realistically we would probably run it just 1-2 hours/day in order to keep our well pump going as long as possible, before we have to start pumping water by hand or hauling it from far away.
Not to be preachy but getting even just a couple kw of solar panels on your roof could be incredibly valuable if you ever had an extended interruption of power and fuel supplies.
good points. Learn stuff but you can survive a leak better than a shock. I have to admit looking at my 2005 NEC book that wiring a hospital or marina is fairly involved. I new trick with 5-15 outlets is to turn it upside down so the ground is top and the hot and neutral are below. Why? if the plug is pulled out a bit if something falls it’s safer because it hits the ground instead of a live blade. I will agree that I can do what I can and will delegate if a fuck up will cause death or fire or explosion. Besides it’s easier to explain to the fire marshall and insurance guy that the work was done by a pro and to code. That is why I always passed on 220v. The trades have been put down too much and better analyses are available versus the college scam. The same for good mechanics and contractors. Thanks guys.