Your electrician in Costa Mesa.

What I see in Costa Mesa homes

Costa Mesa is a postwar city. During World War II the Santa Ana Army Air Base stood where the Orange County Fairgrounds are now, and after the war returning veterans and their families needed houses. The city incorporated on June 29, 1953, and through the mid-1950s and the 1960s thousands of acres of farmland became single-family tracts. Mesa Verde is one of them; the park at its center, named for the tract, was dedicated in 1959. On the Eastside and the Westside, many homes are older than the city itself, built on the long, narrow lots of the first subdivisions.

A house from the 1950s or early 1960s was wired for a different way of living. What I expect to find is a small service, two-prong outlets with no ground in the bedrooms and living room, a kitchen on one or two circuits, and bathrooms and laundry areas without GFCI protection. Some owners updated part of that over the years and some did not, so every house is its own mix. When running a new ground is not practical, the electrical code allows an ungrounded outlet to be protected by a GFCI and labeled, and I mark each one so the next person knows what is behind it.

By the city's own count Costa Mesa has about twice as many multi-family homes as single-family houses, and the long lots on the Eastside and Westside keep filling in with small-lot homes and backyard units. The city allows accessory dwelling units by right in its residential zones and runs a program to legalize units built without permits before 2020. A new or legalized unit has to be powered properly: usually a subpanel, sometimes a larger service at the main house, and a feeder sized for the distance between them.

The two Costa Mesa reviews on this site both come down to getting the basics right. One customer had the outlets in a newly bought house changed to GFCI in about an hour. The other had been told by a home-warranty electrician that a wall had to be opened to chase a missing neutral; the real problem turned out to be in the main panel, and the drywall stayed where it was.

Permits in Costa Mesa

Costa Mesa electrical permits are handled by the Building Safety Division at 77 Fair Drive. Applications, plans, and permits all go through TESSA, the city's online permitting system, which is where I pull the permit and request the inspection. Once the work is done I am at the house for the inspection. For an ADU, I work with your designer or builder so the service size and the subpanel are on the plans before they go in for review, which saves a round of corrections later. The electric utility in Costa Mesa is Southern California Edison, and if the main service has to grow, their disconnect and reconnect is something I arrange directly.