Electrician FAQs, Rome, GA

Yes. Every job here runs under Georgia electrical contractor license EN219334, held by Tanner Regennitter, and it is a non-restricted license, meaning there is no cap on the size or the voltage of the work it covers. You can confirm it yourself at the Georgia Secretary of State licensee search, which is where anyone should check any contractor they are about to let into the house. Ask us for it, and ask the next electrician too. It is the first and cheapest check you can run on this trade.

In Georgia, yes. The state licenses electrical work at any job size. There is no dollar threshold and no handyman exemption, so the person you hire to swap a light switch needs the same license as the person who changes your panel. The law is written that way because the size of the job says nothing about the size of the risk: a fifteen dollar switch wired wrong sits in the wall making heat for years. A license does not make anyone careful, but it does mean the person was trained, tested and is accountable to the state, and that is worth having on the one trade where bad work smolders inside walls.

Legally, probably yes. Georgia's license law applies to people doing electrical work for hire, and homeowners may work on a home they own and live in. So the honest answer is about safety, not permission. A like-for-like outlet swap is within reach of a careful homeowner if two things are absolute: the breaker for that circuit is off, and the outlet is verified dead with a tester before anything is touched, because the wall switch proves nothing. Stop and call if you find anything beyond the ordinary once the cover is off: scorched or brittle insulation, aluminum wire, no ground, conductors pushed into the back of the outlet instead of held under the screws, or an outlet that ran warm before it failed. Every one of those means the outlet was a symptom, and swapping it treats the wrong thing.

Yes, and we treat the permit as part of the job rather than paperwork left for you. Panel changes, service upgrades, new circuits, EV chargers and generator installations get permitted through the local building department and inspected when the work is done. A like-for-like swap of a switch, outlet or fixture generally does not need one. The permit is for your benefit more than ours: an inspector who does not work for us verifies the work, the record follows the house, and when you sell or insure the home, the permitted work is the work that counts.

Yes. Journey Electric carries liability insurance and a certificate of insurance is on file. If you want to see it before work starts, ask and we will send it. Insurance and a license are two separate things and it is fair to check both.

Because a printed price would be a guess dressed up as a promise. What an electrical job costs depends on what is behind the drywall and inside the panel: how the circuit was run, what shape the wiring is in, whether the panel has room for what you want to add. Two jobs that sound identical on the phone can be hours apart once the cover comes off. What you can always get from us is a straight description of what the job involves and what would move the number, and once we have seen it, a real figure. Photos of the panel and the problem get you most of the way to that answer before anyone drives over.

You hear about it before it costs you anything. Walls hide things, and the older homes around Rome hide more than most. When something turns up that changes the scope, the work pauses, you get shown what was found, what it means and what your options are, and nothing extra happens until you say so. What we will not do is quietly absorb a problem by doing the job badly, or bury a surprise in the invoice. Both of those are how this trade earns its bad stories.

Rome and Floyd County are home, and we work across Northwest Georgia, including Cedartown, Rockmart, Calhoun and Cartersville. If you are near one of those towns and unsure, ask. Distance mostly affects scheduling, not whether we will come.

Monday to Friday, 7am to 5pm. Call in that window, and if we are mid-job and miss you, leave a message and it gets returned. Outside those hours, send the quote form or leave a message, and if it is an emergency say so when you call.

For the first visit, yes, at least at the start. Walking the job with you is how the quote gets accurate, and questions come up that only you can answer. For the work itself, we need access to the rooms involved and to the panel, and power to part of the house will be off while we work. Whether you stay is up to you. Plenty of people let us in, confirm the plan, and get on with their day.

Usually only the circuit being worked on, and you will know which one before it goes off. Panel work is the exception: replacing a panel means the whole house is down while the changeover is made, and you hear that when the job is scheduled, not on the morning of. If someone in the house relies on medical equipment, or you have a freezer full of food, or anything else that makes an outage a real problem, say so up front and it gets planned around.

Three things come before any call to an electrician. If something electrical is burning, get everyone out and call 911. If the problem is on the utility side, the line from the pole, a pulled-loose service drop, a damaged meter base, call your power company, because that equipment is theirs and nobody else is allowed to touch it. For trouble inside the house, a hot outlet, a burning smell with no visible fire, a breaker that will not hold, switching the main breaker off makes the house safe while you figure out the next step. Then call us during hours and we will tell you honestly what we can do and when.

Posted hours are Monday to Friday, 7am to 5pm, so evenings and weekends fall outside them, and emergency work does get taken then. Electrical problems do not keep business hours, so if something cannot wait, call and say so up front rather than leaving a message and waiting. Ask what the call will come to when you ring, because out-of-hours work is quoted on its own terms in this trade and you should hear the number before anyone sets off rather than after. Whether we can get to it that night depends on what else is running, and you will be told either way instead of being left guessing.

They are sister companies, run by the same owner, and they are not the same business. Journey Electric does electrical work under Tanner Regennitter's Georgia electrical license, with its own Google profile and its own website. Journey Home Services is a separate handyman and home repair business in Rome. If your list has both kinds of work on it, send the electrical part here and the rest to them. Two quotes, and neither company guessing at a trade it does not hold a license for.

A breaker trips because something on that circuit pulled more current than the wiring can safely carry, or because the breaker detected a fault. That is the breaker doing its job. Resetting one is safe to do yourself: push the handle firmly all the way to OFF, then back to ON. If it holds, note what was running when it tripped, because a space heater and a microwave sharing one circuit is a common and boring answer. If it trips again right away, or trips every time a particular appliance starts, stop resetting it. A breaker that keeps tripping is reporting a problem, and forcing it to stay on removes the one safety device standing between that problem and the wiring in your walls.

Some signs you can see: breakers that trip often or feel loose in the panel, no open slots left, a fuse box still in service, or a panel that is warm to the touch. One sign you can read: certain brands, Federal Pacific and Zinsco chief among them, have documented failure histories and are worth replacing on the name alone. And some of it is about what you are asking of the panel: a 100 amp service from the sixties was never sized for a house that now runs central air, a modern kitchen and a car charger. Scorch marks or a burning smell at the panel are the exception to taking your time; treat those with urgency. Everything else means it is worth having the panel looked at before you add load, not that anything has to happen this afternoon.

Yes, and without any attitude about it. A dead outlet, one flickering light, a switch that buzzes: that is real electrical work and it is welcome here. Small jobs are also where bigger problems get caught early, because the outlet that stopped working sometimes stopped for a reason worth finding. If you have a short list, even better. Tell us all of it and it gets handled in one visit where that is possible.

Yes to both, and they are two of the most consequential jobs on the list because each one asks a lot of your panel. An EV charger adds one of the largest continuous loads a house can carry. A generator involves changeover equipment that, wired wrong, can push power back up the utility line toward the crew working on it. Both get permits, both get inspected, and both start with an honest look at whether your panel and service can take them. That answer sometimes reshapes the job, and finding out before the equipment is bought is the cheap version of finding out.

Yes. Shops, offices and light commercial buildings around Rome have the same wiring, the same panels and mostly the same problems as houses, at a bigger scale and with less patience for downtime. Tell us the building and the job and you get a straight answer on whether it is a fit.