Residential Electrical in Lebanon, Maine

Lebanon's housing covers more than two centuries, and each period brings its own wiring. In the villages, and especially in the West Lebanon Historic District, houses from the 1700s and 1800s may still hide knob-and-tube circuits and cloth-covered cable behind plaster. Homes built from the 1940s through the 1970s, about 21 percent of the stock, may have ungrounded outlets or aluminum branch wiring. The large wave from 1980 to 1999 generally has grounded wiring but lacks the arc fault and ground fault protection current code expects in kitchens, bathrooms, laundry areas and bedrooms. Houses built since 2000, about 28 percent, are the newest and usually need the least, though a few early ones used first-generation arc fault breakers that are prone to nuisance trips.

Kitchen and bath remodels, finished basements, garage workshops and additions are the everyday projects, and each needs dedicated circuits planned for what will actually plug in. Goodnow Electric installs outlets, switches, GFCI and AFCI protection, rewires knob-and-tube and aluminum circuits, and tracks down faults like breakers that trip without an obvious cause or outlets that have gone dead. Mobile homes, about 15 percent of Lebanon's housing, need work done to the manufactured home rules, with attention to the feeder between the pedestal and the home and to aluminum wiring in older units. Adding circuits to a mobile home also means checking that its panel and feeder are rated for the new load, since the original panel in an older unit may be small.

Lebanon's code office issues building permits and certificates of occupancy, with inspections by appointment on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, and the town administers the Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code under its own ordinance. The office's document list carries no local electrical permit, so electrical permitting follows the state board's rules, including a state permit for any two-family or larger building and any building with two or more meters. That rule matters for anyone adding an accessory apartment with its own meter. Goodnow Electric pulls the permits its work requires and handles the inspections, and the owner is on site for every job.