Certified inspector · independent · nothing to sell
What an inspector actually sees behind your fuse box
Fifteen years of electrical inspections and thousands of homes, and the same faults keep coming back. I write down what I really look at, why it matters and what it costs to put right, in plain language for homeowners.
No advertising, no referral fees, no inspection sales. Read the editorial standards.
Start here
Guides written the way an inspection actually goes
Every guide follows the same order I follow on site, so you can walk through your own installation with a flashlight and a notepad before anyone else does.
Knob and tube, aluminum and cloth wiring
What your insurer asks about, what is safe to leave alone, and what has to come out before anything else happens.
Breaker panelFederal Pacific: do you have to replace it?
Why these panels have such a bad name, what an inspector writes down, and how to choose between replacing now and waiting.
EV chargingCan a 100 amp service handle an EV charger?
How to check the load of your own home, when load management is enough, and when the service has to be upgraded.
SolarThe 120 percent rule, and why solar gets refused
How the busbar rating of your panel limits the size of a solar system, and the usual ways around it without a new panel.
ReportYour home inspection report, line by line
How the report is written, what recommend evaluation by a licensed electrician really means, and what to fix first.
RewiringOld house wiring: do you really need to rewire?
The checks that tell you whether the wiring can stay, what a partial rewire covers, and when a full rewire is the only honest answer.
Recurring findings
Five findings I write up almost every week
Not the rare ones. These are the everyday items that turn a routine walkthrough into a page of findings and a line telling the buyer to call an electrician. Most of them cost far less to correct than people expect.
GFCI protection missing near water
Kitchens, baths, garages, laundry and outdoors. The most common finding in American housing, and the one that most directly prevents a fatal shock.
Two wires under one breaker terminal
Someone needed one more circuit and doubled up on a screw listed for a single conductor. The second wire works loose, and loose is what heats up.
Neutrals and grounds joined in a subpanel
They belong together at the service equipment and nowhere else. Downstream it puts normal return current on the enclosure and the pipework.
Splices outside a box, or a box buried in the wall
Wire nuts lying on attic insulation, or a junction box drywalled over. Every connection has to stay in a box and stay reachable.
Breaker too large for the wire it protects
A 15 amp circuit with a 20 amp breaker, because it kept tripping. The breaker now protects itself instead of the cable inside the wall.
Want the full list?
The 22 findings that show up on almost every inspection report, with the code article and what each one costs to fix.
How it works
What happens on the day of the inspection
Four stages, roughly ninety minutes for an average home. Knowing the order takes most of the stress out of the visit.
The service
Service size, the meter and the main disconnect, plus the age of the wiring, which sets what the code expects of it.
The panel
Panel brand, breaker sizes against wire sizes, terminations, the neutral and ground bars, and the circuit directory.
Grounding
Ground rods, the connection to the water pipe and the bonding of metal piping, each one traced rather than assumed.
Room by room
Outlets tested for polarity and ground, GFCI and AFCI checked with the button, plus anything added later without a permit.
About the author
I inspect installations for a living. This site is what I wish people knew first.
I am an industrial engineer and a certified inspector, and I have spent fifteen years inside electrical installations. Most failed reports are not the result of anything dramatic. They come from small things nobody explained to the owner.
FIXMIRO exists to explain them once, properly, without a quote attached. I do not inspect the homes of readers and I do not take a fee for sending work to anyone.
Editorial standards
How these pages are written
Everything here is checked against the current regulations and against my own reports. Where something is my judgement rather than a rule, the text says so.
Rules are quoted, not paraphrased
Every requirement points to the article it comes from, so you can look it up yourself instead of taking my word for it.
No hidden commercial interest
No advertising, no sponsored guides, no referral fees. If a page ever changes on that point, it will say so at the top.
Updated when the rules move
Each guide carries the date it was last checked. Outdated pages are corrected or taken down rather than left online.
One email a month
One finding a month, explained properly
One email, one thing I ran into that month, and what it means for your own installation. Nothing else, and you can leave with one click.
No sales calls. Your address is never passed on to anyone.