Your electrician in Rancho Santa Margarita.

What I see in Rancho Santa Margarita homes

Rancho Santa Margarita is a young city built on an older plan. The O'Neill family founded the Mission Viejo Company in 1963 and drew up a master plan for the land, and the first homes in the Rancho Santa Margarita planned community were sold in 1986. In November 1999 voters joined that planned community with Robinson Ranch, Dove Canyon, Rancho Cielo, Trabuco Highlands, and Walden, and the new city incorporated on January 1, 2000. The city's hazard plan counts about 17,800 homes, a little over half of them detached houses, and puts most of them between 1980 and 2001.

That puts a typical house here somewhere between twenty-five and forty years old. The wiring is not old in the way a 1960s tract is: the outlets are grounded, the panel has breakers instead of fuses, and at least some wet locations got GFCI protection when the house was new. What shows its age is everything attached to that wiring. Builder-grade fixtures and ceiling fans are wearing out, smoke alarms from the original build are long past their service life, bath fans have gone loud or quit, and receptacles that have had plugs pulled out of them for three decades no longer hold a cord.

The bigger change is load. A house finished in the late 1980s or the 1990s was wired before anyone parked an electric car in the garage, ran a home office from nine to five, or put a spa in the back yard. Before adding a charger or a spa circuit I run a load calculation on the existing service, because a panel that looks roomy on its label can be closer to full than it seems once the air conditioner, the range, and the dryer are counted.

Much of the city is organized around associations. The Rancho Santa Margarita Landscape and Recreation Corporation, SAMLARC, looks after common areas such as the 11.5-acre Lago Santa Margarita and the path around it, and individual tracts can have associations of their own as well. Anything that changes the outside of a house, such as landscape lighting, a camera under the eave, or a charger on an exterior wall, may need that approval before it goes up.

Permits in Rancho Santa Margarita

In Rancho Santa Margarita, electrical permits are issued by the Building and Safety Division at City Hall, 22112 El Paseo. The city offers online building permits through its website, and applications can also be handed in at the City Hall counter; either way, I prepare and submit the paperwork. I pull the permit, call in the inspection, and am at the house when the inspector arrives. Where an association has to approve exterior work, that is a separate step from the city permit, and I give you the specifications your board asks for so the two can move along side by side. Rancho Santa Margarita gets its power from Southern California Edison, so when a job involves a main service upgrade, booking the utility's disconnect and reconnect is part of my planning.