Expert Electrician Services in Ames, Iowa

The oldest Ames homes were wired when electricity was a novelty, and plenty of that original wiring is still in service under decades of blown-in insulation and patched drywall. Knob-and-tube turns hot and brittle with age, cloth insulation crumbles when disturbed, and undocumented splices hide behind every remodel. The fix is a methodical rewire of the affected circuits — opened up, replaced with modern cable, terminated in proper boxes — with the home's historic character untouched. It's careful, unglamorous work, and it's the single most common safety upgrade we do in the historic neighborhoods.

A 60- or 100-amp service made sense when a house ran a refrigerator, a range, and a few lamps. It stops adding up when the same house runs central air, a dryer, a microwave, two home offices, and a garage full of battery tools. You'll recognize the symptoms: breakers that trip on hot afternoons, warm panel covers, and no open spaces for new circuits. A modern 200-amp service with room to spare is one of the smartest electrical upgrades an Ames homeowner can make. It clears the way for everything after it — EV chargers included.

In Ames, power often arrives on an overhead drop: a weatherhead, a mast, and triplex cable running to the pole. Iowa ice storms load that assembly with weight. High winds do the rest: pulling masts loose, cracking weatherheads, and tugging conductors until the house connection goes intermittent. The result can look like flickering lights, partial power, or a full outage on one leg of the service. We re-seat and re-anchor masts, replace cracked weatherheads, and coordinate with the utility on the drop itself, then seal the entry so the next storm has less to grab.

Between the 1930s and the 1990s, hundreds of single-family Ames homes were converted into duplexes and rentals — some through the proper process, some decidedly not. Landlords and buyers inherit the results: splices buried behind drywall, circuits shared across units that should be separate, outlets added with no ground, and panels full of hand-labeled breakers. These homes go through the city’s rental inspection cycle, and electrical violations turn up often. We sort these houses out: mapping circuits, fixing the bootleg work, adding GFCI protection where the code requires it, and documenting it all so the next inspection is uneventful.

The classic Ames setup is a house up front and a garage out back on an alley. It often runs on one tired feeder cable — buried decades ago or strung overhead when the garage was built for a Model T. Now the garage needs to run a modern opener, lights, a workshop's worth of tools, and increasingly an EV charger, and the old feeder sags under the load. We size and run proper feeder circuits to detached garages, set up subpanels with real capacity, and wire EV charging at the amperage the car actually wants. With alley access behind most of these garages, the trench or overhead run is straightforward work.

Summer here brings severe weather, and lightning doesn't need a direct strike to cause trouble. A nearby hit can send a surge down the service, cooking a TV and frying a garage door opener — and some outlets go dead while everything else looks fine. After a storm we get the calls: one dead receptacle, a GFCI that won't reset, lights that flicker when nothing's running. We trace the damage circuit by circuit and replace what's been compromised. Most visits end with a talk about whole-house surge protection at the panel, so the next storm is a non-event instead of a repair bill.