Home

About

Contact

IS Electric Ltd

Anyone can do house wiring, right?

There are two answers to this, the legal and the practical.

Legally, electricians and home owners can do house wiring.

A home owner can do electrical work on their own fully detached dwelling. There must be no separately owned or occupied property (such as a rental suite) fed power from the dwelling and the voltage and current of the electrical service must be no greater than 150 volts to ground and 200 amps, single phase. See the Electrical Safety Regulation (ESR), available via the BC Safety Authority website, for full details.

Practically, electrical work of any kind should be done by trained, licensed, bonded professionals. This would be electricians or in some cases other professionals for specific types of wiring such as alarm installations or extra-low voltage wiring for for such things as thermostats or CCTV/data.

Of course that sounds self-serving, but as the saying goes; “You don't know what you don't know.”
It is all too easy for an inexperienced person to create unsafe wiring without knowing they did anything wrong.

In particular, beware the handyman who says he can do electrical work. Such work is neither legal nor reliable.

Study after study show the leading cause of electrical fires in homes are a result of “handyman tinkering”
-- Electrical Line Magazine November/December 2011

See the Shocking Details section on the tips page for some examples of common mistakes.

back to tips page