I need to hire an electrician for a straightforward situation. What is a good way to find one? After I take you dopers’ advice and call him/her over, what are some good screening questions to ask before I give them the green light to start the work?
Here is the situation that I think (hope) is straightforward: the lights and outlets in my garage stopped working. The fuse / breaker is fine. However the garage door opener does work (hey, why?). What may have caused the problem is my wife and I own an electric car and we’ve been charging it on 110 via a outlet (no ext cords, and with the OEM charger). We’ve been doing this for months and it has worked fine. But I somehow suspect this is the cause — a gut feel.
For now we’re charging the car from an indoor outlet, temporarily using the thickest ext cord I have. It’s decently thick and it doesn’t get warm. I don’t want to do this for long as it’s not good to do so.
Thanks in advance!
If you are a member of NextDoor.com, you could post there for recommendations. This is how I found the electrician I use. He was highly spoken of by dozens of neighbors who explained their situations and his expertise at handling them and I’ve never seen a post where someone complained about him or his work. I’ve found Nextdoor to be a pretty reliable source for home repair. It’s also how I found my excellent plumber.
Is there a GFI outlet in the garage? If so, reset it and see if that fixes things. Otherwise, I’d look at online reviews for a decent electrician, or ask neighbors. Be aware that most electricians belong to a union, so it will likely be expensive. I’d also ask if they are going to charge you a callout fee, or if it’s just time and materials.
Thank you, @aurora_maire . I am on nextdoor. I did that and got two recommendations, cross checked with Yelp, and they’re both good. And thank you, @Chefguy. I reached out to both of them and asked your question. I’m on my way.
Return and report, Mister!
I would recommend at least a couple bids, if its a big job. We needed to get some outlets grounded once and the first guys quoted us $2k. The second guy ran the wires a different, easier way and it was $200.
It’s always good to get a few bids.
Well it’s fixed! And I fixed it. It turns out that a recent house guest staying in our spare bedroom up on the 2nd floor tripped that bathroom’s gfci outlet. I hadn’t noticed that it was tripped. When I reset it, voila!, the garage circuits now work.
Bizarre.
I love it when I’m right.
Whoa wait a minute, friend. The gfci outlet was two stories above the garage, in a bathroom. You asked if there’s one in the garage.
Perhaps not “I’m right”, but I’ll give you that you were kind of close.
But still I find that pretty bizarre.
Ah, but my first thought was “GFI trip”, so my trouble-shooting logic was spot-on. As soon as I read that the breaker/fuse was intact, it pretty much defined the problem. You’re correct that it’s odd that a garage is somehow connected to a GFI in a remote bathroom, but in my years as an electrician I saw all manner of weird shit like that. I lived in one place where if you turned on a closet light, the GFI in the bathroom tripped; military housing was such a joy sometimes. 
Cool.
That electrician stuff is like black magic to me.
You still da man, Chefguy.
All except one of my garage outlets are connected to the GFCI outlet in my bathroom on the floor above the garage. Maybe that’s how they were taught to wire it in the 60s (the GFCI is a later addition). That one circuit has about 20 receptacles and fixtures.
I too had to call out an electrician when all of the outlets in my garage stopped working. He eventually tracked it down to a loose wire in the bathroom.
Now it’s wired with the GFCI in the bathroom being on a pigtail, so if it trips nothing else is turned off. The first outlet in the garage is also GFCI, but wired to protect the rest of the outlets in the garage.
All the 120v outlets in my garage are on the same circuit as my kitchen’s garbage disposal. The disposal is plugged into a 2-gang outlet under my sink, each half of which is on a different circuit (the other is only used for the dishwasher). The garage is two stories below the kitchen (I’m in a condo, with a neighbor sandwiched in between). Maddening.
Do you have to pause your car charging before running the disposal? At least you can do that remotely.
Well, I found out by tripping the breaker when I was doing both at once. And now I realize I misremembered: it was the dishwasher on the shared circuit, not the disposal. I swapped them though after the discovery, and the short duration and lower power of the disposal wasn’t enough to trip it (even the dishwasher was fine until the drying phase). In any case, later I installed a semi-dedicated EV circuit. I don’t do much in the garage that comes close to the limit of the 120v circuit now.
Now that the answer has been answered for realsie, here’s my smartass answer to the OP’s thread title:
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Contact @Prof.Pepperwinkle.
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Get the name of his electrician.
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Don’t use him!
You have that quite correct. We’re still waiting for him to finish a job he started in February.
I’m sorry to hear that. It is so frustrating when you’ve got a problem and the people you hire don’t seem able to fix it.