Five kinds of commercial electrical installation, each priced from a site walk.

A tenant improvement electrician gets handed a suite that is either a bare shell or someone else's leftover layout. We work from your architect's drawings, or we help get them drawn, and we build to the GC's schedule rather than our own.

The typical Phoenix TI is a retail bay, a restaurant or an office suite in a single-story strip or a tilt-up. Open deck above, demised walls between tenants. We run EMT on the open deck because it is the raceway, it is the ground path and it can be added to later. MC cable goes inside the demised and partition walls where pulling conduit would mean opening finished drywall. Mixing the two is normal. Mixing them without a plan is how you end up with a junction box nobody can reach.

Distribution starts at the tenant panel. Most suites we see are fed at 208Y/120V three-phase from the landlord's switchboard, and the first question is whether the existing feeder and meter can carry what the tenant wants to plug in. A restaurant with a hood, a walk-in and a 40-gallon water heater is not the same load as the nail salon that left. We check before we draw.

The thing that goes wrong most on TIs is coordination, not wiring. Ceiling grid goes in before the rough inspection, a mechanical sub lands a rooftop unit where the disconnect was meant to go. Our foreman sits in the GC's site meetings and keeps a written list of what is waiting on whom.

A commercial panel upgrade in Phoenix usually starts with a tenant who needs more than the building has. A new kitchen line, a second compressor, a bank of chargers. The service that was fine in 1998 is not fine now.

We do single-phase and three-phase service upgrades from 200A to 1200A, including new switchboards, meter sections and the feeders between them. The work is mostly planning. A three phase service upgrade means the building is dark while the old gear comes out, so the shutdown is scheduled at night or on a weekend, agreed in writing with every tenant on that service.

The utility is the piece nobody can rush. If the utility needs a service release, that adds lead time we don't control. We tell you that on day one, not week six. Larger switchgear can also sit on order for a long time, and we name the expected lead on the quote rather than discover it after you have signed a lease that depends on it.

On feeders: aluminum is fine, and on a long 800A run it can save a meaningful amount. It has to be terminated on lugs rated AL, with compound where the manufacturer calls for it, torqued with a calibrated wrench and marked. We see the alternative on service calls. It looks like discolored bus and a melted lug.

This is the energy-efficiency side of the business. An LED lighting retrofit in Phoenix pays twice: less power for the lamps, and less heat dumped into a space the rooftop units are already fighting to cool.

Warehouses with metal-halide high-bays and offices with fluorescent troffers are the two jobs we see most. In a warehouse we work from a scissor lift, one bay at a time, so the racking below stays in use. The old fixture comes down whole and leaves on our van for recycling. In an office the troffers are usually swapped or retrofitted with LED kits, ceiling tile by ceiling tile, after hours if the floor is occupied.

Controls are where most of the saving hides and where most retrofits skip. Occupancy sensors in aisles and back rooms. Daylight sensors near skylights and storefront glass, which in Phoenix is a lot of the year. We would rather install fewer fixtures with working controls than more fixtures switched from one breaker.

We count every fixture before we price, because the number on the old drawings is never the number on the ceiling.

Commercial EV charger installation starts with arithmetic, not hardware. The question is how much spare capacity your existing service has on the worst afternoon in August, when every rooftop unit is running.

We do the load calculation first, from the utility's demand data where you can get it and from a survey of the gear where you can't. That number decides how many Level 2 ports the building can carry as it stands, whether load management between chargers makes sense, or whether the honest answer is a service upgrade first.

Then the route. Wall-mounted units on the building side of a staff lot are the cheapest by a distance. Pedestals out in the lot mean trenching, which means saw-cutting asphalt, conduit at depth, a concrete pad and a patch. We coordinate the paving contractor and list their work separately so you can see what the trench costs on its own.

Conduit in an Arizona lot runs hot. Conductors to the chargers are sized for continuous load and for the temperature they actually sit in, not the table's default.

Most commercial electrical repair calls are one of three faults: a breaker that keeps tripping, a termination that has run hot, or a circuit that has gone dead and nobody knows where it runs.

Nuisance tripping in Phoenix is often heat. A breaker in a panel on a west-facing wall in July is running close to its rating before any load is on it. We put a clamp meter on the conductor, read the actual current, look at the termination and decide whether it is an overloaded circuit, a failing breaker or a loose lug. Swapping the breaker for a bigger one is not a repair. We won't do it.

Hot terminations show up as discolored insulation, a smell, or a breaker warm to the touch. Those get fixed properly: cut back to clean conductor, re-terminated and torqued. Dead circuits get traced with a tracer and the panel schedule, and the schedule gets corrected while we are in it.

We work in occupied buildings, so the shutdown is the shortest we can make it and announced before it happens. For a dead service, a burning smell or anything that looks scorched, call the office on 623-209-5244 rather than sending a form.