Car charger
A 40 or 50 amp circuit from the panel to the garage or the driveway wall. The price is almost entirely the length and difficulty of that run.
$700 – $1,900
What we do
Plan the electrical work your house needs.
Compare panel upgrades, repairs, and new circuits, with the scope beside each price. These sample estimates illustrate the demo; a real contractor would quote your house after an assessment.
- $145Flat diagnostic fee, credited against the repair if you have us do it
- $0Estimate for a planned job — panels, EV chargers, additions, remodels
- 4Crews, which is why we can usually be there this week and not next
- 100%Permitted and inspected. Every job, including the small ones
01 · Service and distribution
Panels, service changes, subpanels.
The largest job in a house and the one that decides what else is possible. It has its own page because there is more to say about it than fits here.
- $3,200 – $5,200
100A to 200A service upgrade
New panel, mast, meter socket and grounding, plus permit, inspection and utility coordination. One day, power off for most of it.
- $2,400 – $3,400
Panel replacement, same service size
For an obsolete or full panel where the incoming service is already adequate. No mast work and no waiting on a utility disconnect, so it schedules faster.
- $900 – $2,100
Subpanel
Garage, addition, basement finish, workshop. The price is the run, not the box — a detached garage across a yard is a different job from a subpanel eight feet away.
- $180 – $340
Circuit added to an existing panel
Assuming there is room. If there is not, that is the subpanel conversation above, and we will tell you on the phone rather than at the end of the visit.
02 · Something stopped working
A flat fee, so you are not paying us to think slowly.
Hourly billing on a diagnosis puts you and the electrician on opposite sides of the clock. We charge $145 to find the fault, whether that takes twenty minutes or three hours, and it comes off the repair if you have us do it.
Most of what we find is one of five things, and about a third of the time the answer is a device you could have replaced yourself if you had known which one it was. We will tell you that too.
The five usual answers
A failed device. A receptacle or switch that has come apart internally, usually one that has been warm for a while.
A loose back-stab connection. The push-in holes on the back of a receptacle. Common in houses wired quickly, and the reason half a room goes out at once.
A tripped GFCI you cannot find. Frequently in a garage or a bathroom, protecting outlets in a completely different room.
A failing breaker. Less common than people assume, and worth confirming rather than replacing on suspicion.
Something a previous owner did. This is the one that takes three hours.
03 · Adding something
New circuits, new devices, new capacity.
The planned half of the work. All of it is permitted and inspected, all of it is quoted before we start, and none of it is priced by the hour.
Kitchen and bath circuits
Dedicated small-appliance circuits, GFCI protection, under-cabinet lighting, a range or dryer circuit for a switch from gas to electric.
$340 – $1,400 per circuitOutdoor and landscape
Deck and porch receptacles, a feed to a shed or detached garage, low-voltage landscape lighting, a dedicated circuit for a hot tub.
$450 – $2,800Recessed lighting
Priced per fixture, and the ceiling decides it. An open basement is a different job from a plaster ceiling on the second floor with a bathroom above it.
$160 – $290 per fixtureWhole-house surge protection
A device at the panel that clamps what comes in off the line. Worth the money in a neighborhood with overhead service and mature trees, which is most of this one.
$380 – $620 installedSmoke and carbon monoxide
Hardwired, interconnected detectors on their own circuit, so that one going off means all of them go off. The upgrade people put off the longest.
$95 – $180 per device
Why the ranges are ranges
Access, wiring, permits, and materials shape the estimate.
None of them are visible from the driveway, which is why an honest quote over the phone has two numbers in it rather than one.
- The route
How the cable gets there
An open basement ceiling under the room you want is the cheap end of every range on this page. Getting from a basement to a second floor through finished plaster is the expensive end, and it is the same circuit either way.
- The plaster
What we have to open, and who closes it
Lath and plaster does not patch like drywall. We tell you before we start where a hole has to go, and whether we are closing it or your plasterer is.
- The panel
Whether there is room to land it
A full panel turns a $260 circuit into a $1,600 job. This is the single most common reason a real quote comes in above a phone estimate, and the one you can check yourself in sixty seconds.
- What we find
Previous work
Knob-and-tube in a house from 1930. Plenty of it is still working. It is also the reason a quote goes up when somebody opens the ceiling. Photograph by Laura Scudder, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Not a photograph of Brightwell Electric’s work.Aluminum branch wiring, ungrounded boxes, a junction buried in a wall with no access panel. We do not price for this in advance and we do not pretend it never happens. If we find it, you get told what it is and what it costs before anyone continues.