Electrician in Westlake, California

Westlake is dense prewar apartment housing, much of it still on original meter stacks and cloth wiring. Building wide upgrades here need careful staging so tenants are not left without power.

Westlake grew up around what was then Westlake Park, now MacArthur Park, as one of the city's most fashionable addresses from the 1880s into the 1920s. The mansions of that era were mostly divided into apartments or replaced by brick and concrete apartment buildings and residential hotels from the 1920s, some of them six and seven stories tall. Later infill added stucco walk-ups from the 1950s and 1960s. Today the area is overwhelmingly renter occupied, with large family households in fairly small units.

A building that was wired for a lamp and a radio in each room now has refrigerators, microwaves, space heaters and window AC on the same circuits. In the older buildings we find original fuse panels in the units, ungrounded wiring and overloaded feeders, while the postwar buildings often have breaker panels from brands insurers now reject. Owners call when an insurer or lender demands an upgrade, when a city inspection flags conditions, or when breakers trip constantly across the building.

What Westlake properties usually need