HOWELLS ELECTRIC

Keith Howell is a master electrician. He is very personable and had great vision for what we were trying to accomplish. There was a tremendous amount of work at our house so he brought two journeymen with him. Journeymen are individuals who are being trained so that they may be a master electrician. The problem was that the journeymen did the majority of work and Keith was either with them telling them (and sometimes showing them) what to do and how to do it. Due to the journeymen, the job took at least three times as long to complete which also resulted in a much higher bill. We are pleased by the aesthetics of his work. However, I have had to have other electricians come out to fix small issues. The main issue was with the replacement of the breaker box. Keith failed to pull the permit when the job was requested as he wanted to finish the interior work due to the fact that it was August/September and the breaker box was outside. Turns out that when he finally pulled the permit, it was three days after the codes had changed and there were new requirements. He had his two journeymen test all of the fuses so that they could be labeled and they got several of them wrong and did not recognize when one of the fuses controlled more than one thing or did not control an element. For instance, when we changed one of the kitchen outlets from a toggle switch to a rocker pane, our handyman asked us to turn off the power in the kitchen. We did but it failed to turn off the power to that one outlet. The journeymen wrote out the fuse numbers and the areas they controlled in a notebook, ripped the page out, and handed it to me. Keith then asked me to label the switches because we could not have the permit inspection until this had been completed. It offended me that after the amount of money we had already paid Keith that he was expecting me to do something that was his job and his responsibility. Keith was too busy working on a commercial job several hours away to give this the attention that was required. I put the sheet of paper in a ziplock bag and placed that in the panel for the inspection. Keith was not present for the inspection and the breaker box failed inspection over several very minor code changes. I was never able to get Keith to come back out to correct the issues so that the breaker box could be reinspected and pass the permit inspection.

I have used Howells for a long time. I think that his motto is just hysterical. It says," We're here to remove your shorts!" He is a very nice man. He is a licensed and insured electrician. He does both residential and commercial. He does a very good job. He is always responds very promptly. He is very honest about whether or not the work is necessary and how much it will cost.