Residential Electrical in Berwick, Maine

Berwick’s oldest houses are in and around the village by the Salmon Falls River, the part of town that grew with Nute’s Shoe Factory and later Prime Tanning. Roughly one Berwick house in six went up before 1940, and those got their electricity long after they were built; fuse panels, two-prong outlets with no ground, cloth-covered cable and even knob-and-tube still turn up in them, usually tangled with pieces of later remodels. Tracing a problem in one of them starts with finding out which generation of wiring the circuit belongs to, since a single run can pass through three.

Most of Berwick is newer. With 37 percent of homes dating from 2000 on and 32 percent from the 1980s and 1990s, the typical Berwick job is not a rewire but an addition: circuits for a finished basement, a garage workshop, a heat pump, an electric range or a spare room turned into an office, and GFCI and AFCI protection where the code now calls for it. Mobile homes, about 13 percent of the housing here, bring their own work, including replacing aluminum branch wiring or adding connectors rated for it, updating worn panels and fixing damaged feeders between the pedestal and the home.

Permits from Berwick’s code office cover building, plumbing and septic work, with inspections by appointment three days a week, but electrical work is not on its list. Under the state board’s rules for areas without local electrical permitting, a single-family home needs no state electrical permit either, while a two-family house, an apartment building or a commercial property does. That places the responsibility for single-family work on the licensed electrician. Goodnow Electric is licensed, bonded and insured, takes out any permit that applies and meets the inspector where one is required; the owner is present on every job, and each estimate comes free and on paper. Opening walls for a remodel is the cheapest chance to pull out old cable, run new kitchen and bathroom circuits and install interconnected smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.