Half the kitchen dead. A breaker that resets and trips again ten minutes later. Lights that dim every time the furnace fires. A smell that comes and goes and that nobody can place. The symptom is obvious and the cause is somewhere behind plaster, and in an older Pittsburgh house the finding is the entire job. The Electric Guys diagnose residential electrical faults across the city and about thirty-three miles around, for a $99 service call.
That $99 is quoted on the phone, not at the door. It covers coming out and locating the actual fault, which is deliberately not billed as an hourly meter that climbs while somebody works it out. You get the diagnosis and a price for the repair, and you are free to say no.
Why choose The Electric Guys
- The price is fixed before we drive. $99 on a repair call. No trip charge appearing separately on the invoice, and no pressure to approve the work because a van is already outside.
- We trace rather than guess. Replacing parts until the symptom stops is a way of spending your money to learn something a meter would have told us in twenty minutes.
- Old-house faults are the normal case here. Back-stabbed receptacles, buried junction boxes, shared neutrals and thirty years of amateur additions are what we expect to find, not what throws us.
- You get told what we found. Including the things that are fine, so you know what you are not paying to fix.
Our diagnostic process
- Talk it through first. When it started, what else was happening, what has changed in the house recently. A photo of the panel and of whatever is misbehaving genuinely shortens this.
- Start at the panel. Breaker condition, terminations, evidence of heat, the state of the neutral and ground bars.
- Isolate the circuit. Map what is actually on it — which in an old house is often nothing like what the panel label claims.
- Trace to the fault. Device boxes, junctions and the accessible runs between them, working from most likely to least.
- Explain it, then price it. What is wrong, why it happened, what fixing it costs, and whether anything else on that circuit is heading the same way.
What makes faults here different
Layering. A house in a 1998 subdivision has one generation of wiring installed by one crew to one standard. A house in Bloomfield or Brookline has knob-and-tube, cloth-covered cable from a 1950s kitchen, 1970s aluminium in an addition and modern romex from whenever the last owner finished the basement — all on circuits that were joined together at various points by people of varying skill. Faults in that environment rarely sit where the symptom appears.
The specific ones we find most often: junction boxes buried behind drywall during a remodel, which is both a code violation and an inaccessible failure point; back-stabbed receptacles, where the wire is pushed into a spring terminal rather than wrapped around the screw, which works perfectly until it does not; and shared neutrals across circuits, which produce faults that only appear when two particular things are on at once.
Water is the other constant. Basements in this region take water — hillside lots, old foundations, a high water table down in the river flats — and moisture in a basement or exterior box is behind a large share of the intermittent faults and nuisance GFCI trips we are called to.
And intermittent really does mean intermittent. If the fault only shows up on a wet day or when the dryer runs, say so. It is often the single most useful thing you can tell us.
Serving Pittsburgh, PA and nearby
We cover the city neighbourhoods and out through Mt. Lebanon, Bethel Park, Monroeville, Penn Hills, Murrysville, Robinson, Moon Township, McCandless and Cranberry.
Call or text (412) 501-7391 and describe what the house is doing. If there is a burning smell, or anything is warm to the touch, kill the circuit at the panel if you can identify it and treat it as urgent.