Your electrician in Santa Ana.

What I see in Santa Ana homes

Santa Ana is the oldest city I serve and the county seat. It incorporated in 1886 and was named the seat of the new Orange County in 1889. French Park, northeast of downtown, filled in from the late 1890s into the 1920s with Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, and revival-style homes, and it has been on the National Register since 1999. Floral Park, listed in 2023, has houses from 1894 to 1960, most of them from the 1920s and 1930s. The city has also named historic survey areas such as West Floral Park, Wilshire Square, and Washington Square.

In a house that old the wiring has almost always been redone at least once, and rarely all at the same time. I expect some mix of original knob-and-tube or cloth-insulated wire, two-prong outlets with no ground, a service that was enlarged once decades ago, and circuits added by owners along the way. None of that is automatically an emergency, but it needs to be traced and tested before anything new is connected to it, and on an older house I look in the attic and under the floor, not only at the panel.

When a lot carries more than one household, whether a converted garage, a back house, or a duplex, each unit needs power it can count on, and the original service is often too small for two kitchens, two water heaters, and two air conditioners. Sorting that out can mean separate meters, a subpanel for the back unit, or a bigger service at the house, and I lay out the options with a load calculation before anything is ordered.

The Santa Ana review on this site comes from a Realtor who sends me clients who need a new panel, and panels are a fair question on any older house that changes hands: whether the one there is safe, whether it is big enough, and what the inspection report actually meant. You get a straight answer on all three.

Permits in Santa Ana

Santa Ana electrical permits are issued by the Building Safety Division of the Planning and Building Agency at City Hall, 20 Civic Center Plaza. Since July 1, 2026, the city takes plans and applications electronically through its Accela portal, which also handles fees, permits, and inspection scheduling; I do the portal work and meet the inspector at the house. Properties on the Santa Ana Register of Historic Properties need a Certificate of Appropriateness for alterations, and French Park has its own zoning and design guidelines, so exterior changes on a historic home are checked against those before I start. Southern California Edison is the electric company in Santa Ana, and on a service upgrade the Edison disconnect and reconnect is mine to arrange, so you are not left chasing it.