A+ Electrical Services Inc

George helped me out. He's fantastic. Great integrity, shares his knowledge, does a great job from start to finish, including cleanup. Not my first time using A+, and won't be my last!

A different contractor came out originally to fix the doorbell, but after about a week it didn’t work. I called A+ and they sent out George. He was very knowledgeable, thorough, and kept me informed about the process as he did it. They repaired the doorbell system to my satisfaction.

The electrician sent to diagnose and do the repair work, George, was very thorough, meticulous and patient. He explained the problems and our options. The work was completed the same day because he had the appropriate parts with him. After the work was finished, he gave us suggestions to keep the mechanisms working longer and what we still have to do to upgrade the system.

They determined that it was coming from too much voltage from the power company. They did a really thorough job and showed me their meters so I could understand what I was seeing. They replaced a switch in the bathroom that wasn't working, and fixed the wiring in our Jacuzzi.

He was exemplary. I very strongly recommend this company.

Excellent service. Installed a dimmer switch in our kitchen. Easy to schedule, quick service and reasonably priced.

He performed these procedures seamlessly and professionally. He read the instructions and figured out the instructions quickly and without any difficulty.

George is great. We have used him several times before as well. He is careful, thorough, neat, and punctual. He knows the electrical codes and lets us know if he sees something amiss. He is always honest as well, telling us when we really need to fix something and when it can be left as is. A little expensive, but not out of line with any other electrical contractor, and having had my share of sub-par work done by people who didn't know what they were doing, I am certainly willing to pay a fair price for quality work. We will always use George in the future!

As far as I am concerned no other electrician will ever work in my house but George! He is careful, thoughtful, thorough and fair!

I wanted my porch lights to turn on/off automatically based on the time of sunset and sunrise, so I purchased a couple of Honeywell solar switches. George installed them quickly and they work great. While he was here, I mentioned that my exterior motion lights come on during the day when there is motion. He said that wasn't normal and inspected one of the lights. There was a rubber sticker covering the light sensor that looked like a label, so he pulled it off to reveal the sensor. Now all my motion lights stay off during the day. My builder's electrician missed this step and it wasn't obvious to me that I needed to remove the small label. George is definitely a thinker. He'll offer you good advice and bring up things you may not have thought of. I'll definitely use them again.

George and his co-worker were marvelous! Lights in bathroom work and so does the intercom. They cleaned up all the dirt and mud from digging the trench and left the yard looking as though no one had been there!

I had a very negative experience with A Plus Electrical. A job for which I came away from the estimation session expecting a total cost of around $6000 ended up costing $7500 just for the rough electrical portion, interacting with George was one of the more stressful and upsetting experiences of my life, and the canned lights were installed with flexible conduit, which is counter to building code. I hired A Plus to perform the electrical work for a kitchen and living room remodel ? pulling additional circuits up to 2nd floor, moving and installing 15-20 outlets and installing 14 canned lights. At the end of our (paid) estimation session, George told me that he estimated that completing the job would take a week of Monday-Friday work, with 1 man working for the first 1-2 days, and 2 men working for the remaining days. With George present and looking on, I sat at my computer and calculated that, at $80/hour, that meant that the hourly work would be around $5200. I added $800 to be safe, for an estimated project cost of $6000. George did not indicate that my estimate was missing anything. He did not indicate that the first hour of each visit would cost more than the remaining hours. He also did not indicate that he was omitting any part of the work that would be necessary to complete the electrical portion of my project. We agreed that I would purchase outlets, switches and canned lights on my own, so I figured that the materials costs would not be more than a few hundred dollars (hence covered by the cushion I had put in my $6K estimate), but we did not specifically discuss that part. I GC?d my job myself, and this was the first construction project I have been involved in. At the estimation meeting, George expressed a great deal of discomfort with that, saying that he usually worked with general contractors, and expressing doubts because my ?plans? were hand-drawn cabinetry pictures, and I was not very knowledgeable about construction. However, he accepted the job. As the job progressed, I found that George indeed had no idea how to work effectively with someone such as myself. I knew up-front what appliances were to be installed and what the room layout should be, but did not think to provide George with a mapping up front of where each outlet needed to go for each appliance, and he did not request such a mapping. Whenever he requested that I buy a material or provide a piece of information, I did so promptly, but he repeatedly expressed frustration that he did not have project blueprints (though he had known when he accepted the job that he would not have these), and used this as his defense whenever he had made a mistake or had not been transparent. During the job, there were three unforeseen things that arose, which occasioned an extra 3 ? 5 hours of work, so an overrun of around$450 above the $6K expected would have been understandable. However, what actually happened was that, the rough portion of the electrical work cost $7500, George insisted that he had to be there for the inspection and wanted to charge me additional money for his time waiting for the inspector, and George said that his original estimate had not been intended to include the finish electrical work (installation of fixtures and outlets, etc.), so there would be additional charges for that. Perhaps if I had been a GC I would have understood that George?s estimate did not include these items, or perhaps he was casual himself in estimating and did not really think things through ? either way, he definitely did not make it clear to me during the estimation process that there would be additional charges for these things. Just as bad as the cost overruns, interacting with George was a miserable process. He did not seem to know how to take responsibility for a mistake, apologize and move on. Instead, any time I brought up something that I found less than satisfactory, he got defensive and started saying it was my fault because I didn?t have blueprints for the job and I had made a mistake that caused him extra work (though that extra work took him only between 1 and 3 hours. Also, when it served his argument to say that I had terribly inconvenienced him, he said that fixing that mistake was 2-3 hours' work, but later when I had a chance to get reimbursed by another company for the time, he said it had taken only 1 hour, so I'm not sure which timeframe to believe). It did not seem to matter if I was complaining about $1K of cost overruns and the items he was citing could have caused at most a small fraction of that, nor did it help if I acknowledged accurately the actual impact of my actions ? George still spent his energy citing my errors and deficits instead of taking responsibility for his own. Also, while all of my complaints or discussion were specific to the job and the interactions at hand, George at one point strayed far beyond that to tell me that maybe it was my fault that my former contractor (who has now been sued by the Illinois State's Attorney, and who has been sued 15 times in circuit court prior to my case) stole my money. Equally frustrating, it was very difficult to get out of a contentious conversation with George. Unless I was happy with him and agreed with him, and even if I calmly and repeatedly suggested that the conversation was not necessary, that there was no decision we needed to make at that time and nothing impeding his work, and that we could at least table the conversation until sometime later when tempers had cooled, he wanted to keep on discussing, so during the week that he worked for me, we had multiple hours? worth of arguments from which I found it extremely difficult to extricate myself. Also, after the job was completed, I learned that there was also a significant code violation in the work that George completed. George used flexible conduit to connect the canned lights in my home together. Two other contractors have told me that code requires rigid conduit to be used for this. They said that, while it is not a safety risk, the reason for the code is that if rewiring is ever needed with flexible conduit, it is very difficult to push wires through flexible conduit, and it is often necessary to open up the ceiling to complete the rewiring. To be clear, I do not think that this was intentional ? from everything I could see, George valued doing good work and in spite of our conflicts I do not have the impression that he intentionally sabotaged the job in any way, but still, I was left with an installation that violated code. A Plus did make some accommodations ? they charged me only half of the extra daily first-hour fee, since I had not been aware of it, and they did not charge me for the hours that George detained me arguing. They also in the end did not charge me for George?s time on the day of the electrical inspection. They also did work overtime to ensure that the job got done within 5 days. One of the office staff for A Plus spent about 2 hours discussing the job with me, and her view seemed a little more balanced than George?s, but she still flat out refused to believe me that the estimation session had gone as it in fact did, and refused to provide any discount based on the wild inaccuracy of the estimate. At the end of the A Plus's work in my home, my rough electrical work had been completed, but I was very stressed from interacting with George, had spent $1500 more than expected to get less work than expected, had been told by George?s management that she did not believe my (entirely true) account of the estimation session, and I had 14 canned lights installed in my ceiling for which any rewiring would require ripping out the ceiling. I do not recommend working with George or with A Plus Electrical. With regards to the Provider Response that was posted to this review: - As the provider has not stated any specific "inaccuracies" in my review, I cannot address that point, but can only confirm that I have given an honest report of what occurred.. - I do agree that this was a large project and that I was acting as a general contractor with no previous construction experience. I knew the exact kitchen layout and had identified all appliances prior to the electricians coming, and they did not request any additional documentation from me at the start of the project. Although I could not have drafted a proper blueprint, I certainly could have drawn out any measurements that they needed, put Xs on the wall to indicate where I expected an outlet to go, etc. had they provided some guidance as to what would be useful. It is true that, as a non-GC, there were some things I did not know going in that a GC would have known - here are some examples: 1) the fact that an outlet would be needed at the end of the peninsula in the kitchen 2) how many circuits would be needed for my appliances 3) whether furring strips were or were not needed to accommodate electrical boxes. However, I made no pretense going into the job of knowing these things. A Plus accepted the job knowing that I had no prior GC experience. - It is true that the job passed inspection on the first attempt, but that is because the inspection was not at all thorough (the inspector was in and out of the house in less than 5 minutes) and so the inspector did not notice this issue. The issue was noticed by another contractor who came into my home to do a hood installation. I have since spoken with one of the electrical inspection supervisors at the City of Chicago building department and he confirmed to me that the use of flexible conduit to connect canned ceiling lights, as was done in my home by A Plus Electrical, violates City of Chicago building code.

We were having intermittent lighting issues in our master and guest bedroom. We exhausted all the simple fix options and decided to call for help. George came by, on time, quickly diagnosed the problem and replaced the faulty components. The seemingly connected electrical issues were actually not related at all. George replaced the faulty light switch in the master and diagnosed the underlying problem in the guestroom (we opted not to replace the ceiling fan at this point). George arrived right on time, was helpful in explaining what he was doing and the options that were open to us. After he completed his work, he left the space cleaner than when he found it. If I need additional electrical work done at my home, I would call George back in a second.

The electrician was very polite and professional. He made sure to let me know what he was doing as well as when creating the outlet, was trying to avoid creating a larger hole then needed to ensure that the patching efforts woudl be minimized. He ended up having to open another hole in-order to punch through a metal outlet box to thread the circuit wires. He was very professional and knowledgeable and made sure that he was updating me on his progress.

My initial phone call was answered promptly and I was able to set up an appointment in a short time. The electrician was very knowledgeable and conscientious. He came when he was scheduled to arrive and completed his work promptly.

George is the best. He has been out twice to do a range of work (cable and phone jacks installed, light switch wiring moved, thermostat moved, electrical outlets installed). We know we'll need to have him come out again to do some other work, but we are so pleased to have found someone who is as hardworking and professional to do the job as George is. Not only does he thoroughly review the work before and after, but he's also pointed out things around the house where he can offer some helpful information - even if it's unrelated to the work he's doing!

He was courteous, prompt, respectful and neat. He got right to work, explained everything that he was doing, and suggested options for handling every problem. He successfully repaired the outlet and diagnosed the broken bathroom fixture, which he will return to replace when we have purchased new fixtures. The work took a little more than two hours. I will be using his service again and would highly recommend him.

George is fantastic. He figured out the problem with the electrical going to our dishwasher quickly and fixed it in a jiffy. Everything is up to code now and working perfectly. He even took some time to reinstall the kickplate that was incorrectly installed when the dishwasher was put in initially. Very courteous, punctual, and great attention to detail. We already have more work scheduled with him.

George and his company were extremely professional from my first phone call. They were up-front about the labor costs per hour so I had a clear expectation of what my minimum expense would be prior to scheduling the appointment. After looking at the issue, George gave a very thorough explanation of what was wrong, options to fix the problem and pricing as well. His professionalism and thoroughness was excellent and I will be calling A+ again for future needs.

George has been doing our electrical work since we moved into our home last year. He has made several visits over the last 12 months rewiring and installing everything from ceiling fans to breakers. He is always punctual, hard-working, diligent, calm and clear in his explanations and just does excellent work. We would not think of calling any other electrician. Our safety is in the best of hands. We will continue to rely on A+Electrical Services, Anna in the office who schedules George and George himself for all of our electrical work and any emergency that may occur.

A+ Electrical Services did an amazing job with our kitchen lighting. My husband and I had been trying to get our kitchen light fixtures to work for over a year and had 3 other people come out with no success. George came and fixed the problem for good-he was wonderful! I highly recommend them for any electrical 'troubleshooting' needs you might have.

It went fantastic and we are a more safe and happy home again.

George did a good job and was very professional. He also took the time to explain his work, and he gave me instructions for operating the fan and changing the frequency of the remote for the fan if I ever wanted/needed to do so. He did get held up and arrived a little bit later than our appointment time, but he called to alert me that he would be a bit late, and I know sometimes these things are unavoidable. In any event, it was really great that he could fit us in on a Saturday at no extra charge. I would use him again.

I would rate them highly and would use them again in the future if necessary.

Overall experience was unacceptable.