Is the Electrician trying to scam me?

Question

I own a home in California and was emailed by my property manager about an electrical problem with an outlet. The outlet was fixed according to the tenant but the repair man through the manager thinks there is still a problem. Just wanted to know if this sounds right or if I'm being scammed. This is the email:

"I installed a new outlet as needed in the upstairs guest bathroom. I also tested each of the bathroom GFI circuits and they are now operating properly. The old outlet failed on the inside and melted. The plastic covering on the wires were also meted. Because of that I also started checking some of the other circuits in the bedrooms. I'm extremely concerned based on the tests I did on a few random bedroom outlets. I found an amperage issue. Normal amperage is either 15 or 20 amps. The bedroom outlets that I tested were pulling 36-49 amps. This is very dangerous. I would need to test all of the outlets and switches in the home and outside the home to trace where the amperage issue starts. I will also need to go through the main electrical breakers one by one. The volts aren't an issue here, it's an electrical outlet, switch, breaker, or bad wires pulling a high level of amps. High amps like that will make the wires heat up and melt the plastic coating off. If that plastic coating is melted due to the wires heating up, it will allow the copper wires to touch each other and that can potentially cause a fire. Because I will need to open up each outlet and switch one by one and also test all the breakers. It will take several hours. The estimated cost of labor will be $340. If we need to replace more outlets or breakers or even wiring in the walls obviously the price will need to be revised to accommodate the cost of any new parts. Please let me know ASAP If you want me to proceed. I can move it to the top of my list because it's a life and safety issue. This issue is not only very dangerous, it can burn out any products that are plugged in to outlets, such as TVs, stereos, and any electronic devices. I told the tenants to unplug any high dollar items just to make sure nothing will get damaged due to a surge in amps. Again please let me know how to proceed as soon as you can. I'm afraid this problem may cause a fire. It also might be a good idea to replace all the smoke detector batteries if they haven't been done for a while. That would cost $50 in labor and $40 for all the 9v batteries. The cost of the batteries are high because due to the new law when detector batteries are changed, they need to be replaced with the 10 year batteries and the date of install marked on each one. If you go online you can check the pricing of the batteries. Unfortunately the required 10 year batteries are twice as much as the regular 9v batteries. "

Answer 1

Quote: "The bedroom outlets that I tested were pulling 36-49 amps."

Sounds fishy. Outlets do not pull any amps by themselves. Did this electrician plug in to the outlet with some kind of test load to draw this power? If not, the electrician is probably not honest or does not know their job. I was an electrician for about 10 years, granted that was 30 years ago but I have never heard of testing the "amps pulled by an outlet" since outlets do not "pull power" at all, only the load (your lamp, tv, or whatever) plugged into the outlet "pulls power."

Finding the breaker at the panel is easy:

This paragraph assumes you have only one breaker panel and is a good place to start if you don't happen to know. Plug a radio into one of the outlets in question and turn the volume up so you can hear it from the breaker panel. A lamp works also but you have to run back and forth to check if the lamp is on. Turn off all 15 and 20 amp breakers one at a time. You should hear the radio go silent when the proper breaker is turned off. If there is still power to the outlet(s) in question after all 15 and 20 amp breakers are off, then it would be logical that they are not wired properly and may well be wired to a higher amp breaker. Skip the next paragraph in that case.

If you found the breaker that controls the outlet(s) in question you can replace the breaker if you want to be sure there is no problem with the breaker.

If the outlets are not powered off after all the 15 and 20 amp breakers are off, then try the higher amp breakers one at a time until you find the guilty breaker. THEN, be sure you do not have a sub panel somewhere that is fed by that high amp breaker. If you do, then you need to start over with that breaker panel.

BTW, even if there is no "amps problem" you may still want to open all the outlets and check them if one had melted insulation. That is almost always caused by a poor connection or nicked wire. The outlet was likely not installed properly to start with.

Another reason the outlet may have failed, since the electrician claimed that it melted from the inside, is that a heater or other high draw appliance was plugged in loosely. That would cause the same problem as a bad connection to the outlet. In fact it would be a bad connection, just that it happens to be the plug, not in the wall wiring. If your outlets are worn out, that is, you feel little or no resistance when you plug something in, they are a fire waiting to happen when someone plugs a space heater in.

Answer 2

Without even reading what this person wrote, the answer in this situation is always the same. If you don't feel confident that a contractor/electrician/plumber/etc. is telling the truth, or even if you do but simply want to evaluate their estimate. Get a second opinion (and third, or fourth).

Answer 3

I totally agree with Speedy Petey on calling someone else for an estimate. The writing style definitely seems scam-ish, particularly with the "hire me now" vibe throughout the message.

That said, if he measured current draws of 36-49 amps, then he is right to be concerned since this is a serious safety hazard and his plan of action does not sound too far fetched. If true, it sounds like someone may have illegally tapped off of a 50 amp line somewhere in the building to power some of the outlets in the building. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell this simply by looking at a schematic, the breaker panel, or the wires at individual outlets because someone would have done this as illegal patchwork. When work is illegal and nowhere near code, chances are that the person who performed the work didn't leave a nice record of what they did in the form of a schematic or otherwise. Therefore, there is no way to tell where it started without going through systematically and figuring out where the problem starts as suggested in the proposal.

Answer 4

If the circuits are properly wired and on proper sized breakers, ie: #14 on a 15A breaker and #12 on a 20A breaker, then there is NO way the circuits could be pulling more than 35 amps for more than a minute or two. There is no way the wires would burn up if the breakers are correct as they would trip.

I have NO idea what he means by all this and no, it does not sound right. From what you describe it does sound like some kind of a scam. It also kind of sounds like maybe he found some burned wires, typically due to a poor connection, and does not know how to troubleshoot it. Was this guy a real electrician, or some kind o handyman??

First thing I would do is get clarification form this guy, then call someone else to give you a second or even third opinion estimate.

Answer 5

Other answers are good, but one more thing surprised me in electrician's letter:

it can burn out any products that are plugged in to outlets

If voltage is right, and product not damaged, then it will draw what amps it needs to and nothing more. No risk of burning. And outlet has no way to make voltage higher.

The only way I see it might not be a scam is if:

1. He tested outlets with test load to see when breakers will cut the line and found it allows too much current and
2. He expected you and your landlord not understand "technical speech", tried to simplify it, and failed miserably.

It's not impossible for the above to happen, of course, but even if your outlet is connected via breaker with too high amp rating, you shouldn't be in an immediate danger, and language electrician was using seems to be exaggerated and scary on purpose.

Personally, I would check which breaker it's connected to (as described by Jm Alt), and replace it. It's cheap and it's always better to be sure. Next weekend or other convenient time, I would also check other outlets, to be sure they are connected to breakers with proper rating. In my flat whole procedure took 2 people less than 15 minutes, but of course your mileage will vary - houses have it more complicated. If you don't have time or inclination, call another electrician. As unrelated to the first one as possible. Don't tell him about "findings" of his colleague (he might feel inclined to cover for him, even subconsciously), just ask him for breaker inspection and diagram which one goes where.

Answer 6

I found an amperage issue. Normal amperage is either 15 or 20 amps. The bedroom outlets that I tested were pulling 36-49 amps

So like others here, I would be interested to know what he did to test this? you must plug in some kind of load box that begins shorting out the line and measuring current. What it says is, the breaker is not working.

You find which breaker it is, and find out where it came from and possibly find out who installed them because if thats the case? It could be an issue for neighbors who had their homes built by the same builder.

Besides the breaker not working, the GFCI that melted internally? find out where that came from, the company might be some made in China ripoff where the home builder used cheap junk to try and charge for high quality GFCI's at say $15-20 each but paid $1 each; Maybe the same for the breakers, charged for quality made in USA breakers but installed made in China junk?

Youve got an issue where either the home builder or some contractor has used the wrong parts for household wiring (or someone put the wrong parts in), so other families could be at risk who don't yet know and you should tell your city manager or someone who issued permits.

You would want to KEEP the old gfci that melted, and KEEP the bad breakers, they could be important evidence and save lives.

It sounds like if what the Electrician says is true they are doing the right thing but if its true? someone out there is putting families in danger by bad wiring, so do the right thing.

Answer 7

Ask him to explain what he thinks actually happened. What he wrote is absurd, if taken literally, but may have been merely inaccurate wording in the reporting.

An outlet, working properly, should never "pull" any number of amps. "Pulling current" is a phrase used to describe loads placed on a circuit. The outlet should not be a load, just a way to connect the load to the house wiring. If I translated that correctly, it would mean the outlets are each consuming 36-49 amps of current. Given these are 120V lines, this means each outlet is using 4.3-5.8kW of power on a continuous basis. This would show up in a power bill noticeably. In realistic situations, the power consumption of an entire house doesn't average that high, and we're talking about a single outlet!

If I assume he is just being sloppy with wording, I can come up with a valid explanation for what he said. Whether it is valid or not is not my call to make, you should ask the electrician for more information, and verify what he actually did (disclaimer: I am not an electrician, nor a lawyer). If the plastic insulation on wiring melts, that's a really unusual thing. The insulation is usually rated to handle the heat from currents well in excess of the rating on the wire, and we put a circuit breaker on the circuit to stop said current before it becomes an issue (such as if you short the circuit out with a malfunctioning appliance). Seeing melting wires would trip my curiosity detector for sure. If my van is well equipped, I may have a testing box which I can use to see how much load I can put on a circuit before the circuit breaker trips. Such a meter is easy to create, using a rather large variable resistor and some circuitry to lower the resistance until the circuit breaker trips. It probably even has some clever circuitry to safely trip circuit breakers without putting enough sustained load to overheat wires. If I were using such a meter, and I was sloppy, I might phrase something as "the outlet pulls X amps," when I actually mean "when connected to the outlet, my tester was able to pull X amps before the breaker tripped." Seeing those 36-49 numbers would also raise my awareness. He is correct that most house circuits (virtually all of them) are wired for 15-20 amps unless special considerations are needed. Seeing double that suggests that there may be something unusual upstream.

If all of these interpretations are correct, then he is correct when he states that it is a safety hazard. We design the electrical system of a house to fail in the least-dangerous places first. Thus, we want the circuit breaker to trip long before we start to hit the wire's maximum rated amperage. If a circuit breaker flips, it angers a tenant, and they have to go reset the breaker. If a wire fails... well.. you never know where in the walls that failure is, and what damage it might cause before it is noticed and solved. The electrician may have found evidence that there is something incorrect in your house's wiring, and now the wiring is becoming the "first line of defense" for your house.

Answer 8

This makes no sense to me at all.

As others have said, the only way he could actually be saying this is if he used a load test to see what he could draw before the breaker popped.

The problem with this is that the breaker pops--he knows what's miswired (although knowing what's miswired and knowing where it's miswired are two very different things.)

Saying that it's drawing too much without indicating what it's actually wired to sounds very suspicious to me!

Answer 9

Any contractor that can move you to the front of the line has no line. There are several red-flag statements in this response/proposal. Recommending battery replacements, for example, is not in scope.

Try again with at least two other proposals.