Commercial Electrician in Exeter, NH for Property Managers

Commercial Electrician in Exeter, NH for a Rental Market of Four Kinds of Property

About 31 percent of Exeter's occupied homes are rented, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024. About 26 percent of housing units are in buildings of five or more units, about 14 percent in buildings of two to four, and about 12 percent are manufactured homes. A manager with a portfolio in Exeter is therefore holding some mixture of apartment complexes, small multi-family houses, flats over shops and homes on rented lots.

Each of those has a different electrical personality. An apartment complex is a matter of meter banks, parking lot lighting and shared systems. A small multi-family house is a matter of one old service feeding several kitchens. A mixed-use block downtown has a shop's load on the ground floor and flats upstairs. A manufactured home community is a distribution system laid across a field, with pedestals instead of panels.

A. Pro Electric works with managers on all four, and we start by finding out which one a building is. The same job description, a failed breaker or a dead light, means something different depending on the answer, and the right response depends on the building as much as on the fault.

Manufactured Home Communities in Exeter Run on Pedestals and Buried Feeders

Manufactured homes are about 12 percent of Exeter's housing units, which is a large enough share that a good number of them sit in communities where a park owner owns the distribution and the residents own the homes. A park is a small electrical utility. There is a main service, feeders that run underground across the park and a pedestal at each lot with its own disconnect and meter or receptacle.

The failures are the ones you would expect from equipment that lives outdoors in a New Hampshire winter. Pedestals are knocked by plows and pushed over by frost, corrosion works at the enclosures and the lugs, and a feeder that was adequate for the home that originally stood on a lot is not always adequate for the larger home that replaces it. When a home is replaced, the feeder, the pedestal and the permit are all part of the job.

Whether a park is master metered or each home has its own supplier meter changes who calls and who pays, and we ask early. The code has its own load calculation for a park, which is not the one used for a house, and the main service, the feeders and the pedestals are sized from it. A commercial service and distribution upgrade is the larger version of the same work.

Apartment Complexes in Exeter Need Their Parking and Common Lighting Kept Working

In a complex of ten or a hundred units, the electrical work a manager sees most is the shared system. Meter banks, a house panel for the common areas, hall and stair lighting, laundry rooms, exterior receptacles and the lighting that makes a parking lot safe in a New Hampshire winter when it is dark by half past four.

Parking lot and building exterior lighting is the item that fails quietly. A pole light with a failed photocell stays on all day or never comes on, a fixture with a failed driver is dark and nobody reports it, and the first complaint arrives when someone has an accident. A scheduled walk of the property after dark, with a list of what is out, is the cheapest maintenance there is.

The older fixtures are worth replacing in blocks. An LED retrofit on exterior and common lighting pays back from the energy and the lamp changes it avoids, and the LED payback calculator gives the first estimate. What an LED retrofit really pays back sets out the numbers, and it is the sort of project that is best done across a whole property at once.

Downtown Exeter Mixed-Use Buildings With Shops Downstairs and Flats Upstairs

The streets around the town square and Water Street hold commercial buildings that were built long before the code was written, and the Census figures show that about 23 percent of Exeter's housing predates 1940. A good number of those buildings now hold a shop, an office or a restaurant on the ground floor and apartments upstairs, with a single old service and a meter bank that has been added to by successive owners.

The electrical questions in a block like that are the same ones every time. Which meter feeds the stair light? Is the shop's load on the same panel as the flat's? Is the service big enough for a restaurant tenant and four apartments? A manager who cannot answer them has a building that will produce a nuisance call on the worst possible day.

So the first job in an older mixed-use building is a survey, with every meter traced, every panel labeled and the service's capacity set against what the tenants now run. It is a morning's work and it answers most of the questions a manager will have in the next five years. How multi-tenant electrical works explains what to ask for.

Small Landlords With Two-to-Four-Unit Houses in Exeter and a Standing Electrician

About one housing unit in seven in Exeter is in a building of two to four units. Those are usually owned by a person or a small company with a handful of buildings, not a management firm, and the owner is often also the person who takes the call at ten at night. The electrical work is varied, a bit of everything, and rarely big enough to justify a contract with anyone.

What suits that landlord is a standing relationship, an electrician who knows the buildings and can walk into any of them. We keep a record of each property's panel, its service size and what has been done, so the next call starts from what is already known and not from nothing. An annual walk of each building for the things that fail, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, ground fault outlets, the exterior lights and the panel, finds the problem before the tenant does.

A maintenance contract is the formal version, and it makes sense once a landlord has enough buildings that the visits repay themselves. Short of that, we are happy to be the number you call, and the record we keep makes each call quicker than the last.

Exeter Properties Near Route 101 and the Downeaster Station Want Chargers

Exeter has an Amtrak Downeaster station, four exits from Route 101 and Interstate 95 about five miles to the east, which makes it a commuter town in both directions, with tenants who drive and tenants who take the train. Electric cars are following the same pattern, and a manager who does not offer charging will hear about it from the residents who own one.

Charging at an apartment property is mostly a question of capacity and billing. A building has one service and every charger takes a share of it, so most multi-family properties manage the load instead of upgrading the service, and decide whether the charging is free, built into the rent or paid for by the user through a meter or a networked charger. The electrical side of that decision is ours, and the commercial side is the owner's.

Commercial EV and fleet charging covers the equipment and the installation, and workplace EV charging sets out the same thinking for an employer. A manager who plans one or two chargers now, with conduit left for more, spends less than one who adds them one at a time.

Service Upgrades, Metering and Supplier Coordination for Exeter Buildings

Buildings change use, and the service often does not change with them. A house became two apartments, a shop became a restaurant and a garage became a workshop. Each change adds load, and the service that was sized for the original use is the thing that limits what can be done next.

A service upgrade in a multi-tenant building means the supplier, the owner and sometimes every tenant. The supplier schedules the disconnect, the owner pays and the tenants lose power for the duration. Unitil's own list shows it supplying part of Exeter's electricity, so the supplier for a given building is confirmed for the address before anything is booked, and we plan the shutdown for a time that suits the tenants.

Where the metering has drifted from the units as they now exist, the fix is a decision. Either the metering is brought back into line with the building, which is a service-side job, or the arrangement is accepted and written down. We lay out both with their costs. The one answer that does not work is leaving it unexamined, because a billing dispute between tenants is a nuisance that always arrives at a bad moment.

For a commercial electrician in Exeter, NH who works with property managers, A. Pro Electric, licensed in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, starts by learning which kind of property a building is and keeps a record of it for the next call.