10-14-2012, 09:39 AM
Yeah, I don't see much danger in a handy amateur wiring a house before it's inspected and HELCO hooks up. My experience with a Hilo electrical contractor (their name is Hawaiian for "Moses") wasn't too impressive: generally surly "journeyman" who wired an exterior light switch so that it shut off interior outlets, wired my 110V water heater to 220V and fried it's element, bored a hole for the HELCO hookup mast through bird-block and metal roof and failed utterly to make the hole water-tight so that my main breaker-panel was soaked the first time it rained, and discarded jam nuts from my overhead interior lights that locked the threaded center tubing for the glass light cover retainers (unscrewing the retainers when these nuts are absent causes the threaded tube to also unscrew so that the simple job of replacing bulbs becomes a nightmare). $5000.00 to wire a 720 square foot cottage and endure this guy's attitude and sloppy work. To be fair, I understand this character was fired.