By Brent Allen Strawhacker | Marketing Director, T.A.P. Electric | West Burlington, Iowa
Before you hire any electrician in Southeast Iowa, there are seven specific questions worth asking. Most homeowners only learn what they are the hard way. A panel that fails inspection. A quote that grew on the way to the final bill. A contractor who stopped returning calls. The list below is the conversation worth having before any of those happen, not after. The right electrician will be glad you asked. The wrong one will tell you everything you need to know in how they answer.
Why these seven questions
The difference between a good electrician and a bad one shows up in the conversation before anyone takes a tool out of the truck. Each of the questions below is a small filter. None of them will catch every bad contractor on its own, but together they catch most. The good electricians in Southeast Iowa won’t mind hearing them. The ones who do are telling you something.
Here’s the list every Southeast Iowa homeowner should have before picking up the phone, especially our neighbors in West Burlington, Burlington, and the surrounding towns:
- Where they’re based and what their service area actually looks like
- Whether they’re licensed and insured, and in which states
- Whether you can see their prices before they come out
- What their reviews actually say (and how many of them there are)
- Who is actually coming to your house, and how long they’ve been with the company
- How you reach them, and how fast you can expect to hear back
- What happens if something goes wrong after the job is done
The expanded version of each question, why it matters, and what a good answer sounds like, follows below.
1. Where are you based, and what does your service area actually look like?
The first sanity check. Some electricians list a service area the size of three counties, then turn down jobs at the edges or surprise-bill you for the drive. A local electrician with a tight, honest service area shows up faster, knows the inspectors, knows the utility processes, and works under the local code amendments instead of guessing them.
A good answer is specific. A town, a radius, a short list of cities. “We’re based in West Burlington. We cover Southeast Iowa and West Central Illinois, usually within about an hour of the shop.” That’s a real answer. “We work statewide” is not.
What we do: T.A.P. Electric is based in West Burlington, Iowa. We serve Southeast Iowa and West Central Illinois, primarily Burlington, West Burlington, Keokuk, Fort Madison, and the small towns on both sides of the river.
2. Are you licensed and insured, and in which states?
The Iowa River is a state line, and Iowa and Illinois have separate electrical licensing requirements. An electrician who carries only one of those licenses might not legally be able to work on your side of the river, depending on where you live. You can verify any Iowa electrician’s license through the Iowa Electrical Examining Board public records. Insurance matters for a related reason: if something goes wrong and the contractor isn’t insured, your homeowner’s policy is the next thing in line, and that conversation never goes the way you want it to.
A good answer names the license, names the states, and offers to send proof if you ask. The contractor should also carry general liability at minimum, and workers’ comp if they have a crew. None of this should take more than 30 seconds to walk through.
What we do: T.A.P. Electric is fully licensed in both Iowa and Illinois, fully insured, and BBB-rated. We work across the state line every week, and the paperwork keeps up with us.
3. Can I see your prices before you come out?
This is the question that sorts contractors faster than any other. Most contractors won’t publish prices because their business model relies on you not knowing what something usually costs. The ones who do publish prices are running on a different model: do the work right, quote it accurately, and let the customer make a real decision before anyone steps on the porch.
A good answer sounds like “Yes, our common service pricing is on the website. Walk us through what you’re trying to do and we can give you a starting number before we drive out.” That’s the transparent version. “We need to come out to give you a quote” is sometimes the honest answer, because some jobs genuinely need a look. But it shouldn’t be the answer for everything.
What we do: TAP publishes detailed starting prices for common services at tap-electric.com/pricing. If the work you need is on the list, you can see what it’ll start at before you call. If it’s not, we’ll quote it after we look, and we’ll quote it before we start the work, not after. (For more on how a fair electrician quote actually gets built, see our piece on getting a fair quote.)
4. What do your reviews actually say?
A “5-star rated electrician” is one thing. What customers actually write in those reviews is another. The volume of reviews tells you whether the business is busy enough to have a real track record. The content of those reviews tells you what kind of business they run. Read four or five of them and look for the specifics: names, jobs, follow-through, how the contractor handled the moment something needed handling.
A good answer points you to where the reviews live and doesn’t try to curate which ones you see. A business that does the work well is comfortable with you reading the full list.
What we do: T.A.P. Electric has 81 five-star reviews on Google as of this writing. Most of them name the electrician (Troy, Austin, or Griffin), the kind of job, and the moment that made the customer comfortable enough to write the review. We’d rather you read the whole list than trust our curated highlights.
5. Who is actually coming to my house, and how long have they been with the company?
An electrician you trust by reputation is only useful if THAT electrician is the one who shows up at your door. Some contractors send subcontracted help. Some send a new apprentice on a job that needed a journeyman’s eye. Either can be fine when it’s disclosed up front. Both should be disclosed.
A good answer names names. The contractor tells you who’s on the crew, who’s licensed, who’s training, and who’s going to be at your house. If an apprentice is coming, that isn’t a red flag. An apprentice working under a licensed electrician is how the trade gets passed on (and we’ve written elsewhere about why you might see more than one electrician on your job). It’s just something you should know before they show up.
What we do: Troy, the owner and master electrician, is on every job at some point. The full-time crew today is Troy, Austin (journeyman), and Griffin (apprentice, working under Troy’s license). When you call the office, you reach Brent or Veralynn. Almost every job we run is staffed entirely from that in-house crew. If a specialty trade or a coverage need ever calls for outside help, we tell you up front and stand behind the work either way.
6. How do I reach you, and how fast will I hear back?
Electrical problems don’t always come up at convenient times. A bathroom GFCI on Sunday morning. A panel that won’t reset Friday at 7 PM. A flicker at 2 AM. The window between “I have a problem” and “someone called me back” is where most homeowners decide whether they trust the business they reached out to.
A good answer puts a specific number on the window. “We return calls within 24 hours” is a real answer. “Whenever I get to it” is not. The contractor should also tell you the channels they accept (call, text, email, web form) so you can use the one that fits your situation. Here’s a longer look at what to expect when you call an electrician, including the conversation, the timeline, and the pricing-conversation cadence.
What we do: T.A.P. Electric commits to a 24-hour return-call promise across call, text, and email. After-hours emergencies route differently. That’s a conversation we have when you call.
7. What happens if something goes wrong after the job?
This is the question most homeowners don’t think to ask, and the one that separates a contractor from a company you can recommend by name. Electrical work that fails after the fact is almost always one of three things: an install error, a part defect, or a missed code detail. Those happen across the trade. The real question is whether the contractor comes back to fix it when one shows up.
A good answer doesn’t dodge. The contractor doesn’t read you a warranty in legal language. They tell you, in plain words, what they actually do when a customer calls back. The best version of this answer sounds like a description of existing practice, not a sales line written for the website.
What we do: Our working posture: we don’t call a job done until you do. If something we installed isn’t right, we come back. We don’t write that in a paragraph of warranty language. We just do it. That’s the deal.
A note on hiring electrical work
Some decisions in life are hats. You put one on, you take it off, you try another one if it doesn’t fit. Hiring an electrician isn’t quite a hat. If the work’s right and the relationship’s right, you’re going to call the same person back for the next panel upgrade, the bathroom remodel, the generator install. If it’s not, you’re going to start over from question one. Probably under worse circumstances than the first time.
The seven questions above are the conversation to have before that happens. Ask them. Listen to the answers. The right electrician will be glad you did.
If you’re in Southeast Iowa or West Central Illinois and want to start that conversation with us, T.A.P. Electric is at tap-electric.com. The pricing is on the site. The reviews are on Google. The phone gets answered.
By Brent Allen Strawhacker | Marketing Director, T.A.P. Electric | West Burlington, Iowa
