My Mother hired a licensed electrician to install 1 ethernet drop in her home office. She already had a preexisting tp-link setup in the basement. She showed me the invoice today which totaled $958.00! I’m shocked and disgusted. Feels like they took advantage of my Mother.
I told my Mother to call them first thing tomorrow morning to see if they possibly made a mistake. If not, I advised her to never do business with that company again. This seems like highway robbery. Is there anything else she can do?
That’s insanely overpriced. But I think the first mistake is getting an electrician instead of a low voltage tech.
This right here. Might not be an overcharge for an electrician depending on the details of the cable run - but a low voltage guy would have done it for 1/3 of that. Opportunity dollars matter
Everyone in this group says this, but I live in a small to medium city (metropolitan area population just over a million) and I could not find a “low voltage electrician” anywhere. Called tons of people. Closest I could find (who wasn’t just a normal electrician) was a computer repair guy who said “I suppose I could do some runs but I’m not a network guy” and a high end home theater shop that point blank told me it wasn’t worth their time unless I bought a multi thousand dollar home automation system from them.
So how exactly do I find a low voltage tech? Cause Google didn’t work. I suppose there must be a bunch of people who work the commercial side but it was near impossible to find anyone who did residential.
Google “structured cabling”.
Low voltage contractors are probably there, they are probably security or fire alarm guys who would be able to point you in the right direction most likely if they them self would not do it. The company I work for wouldnt have done a job like that unless it was a favor as we do large jobs but even if my boss was willing to do that for a premium price it wouldnt have been that much unless it was like a 2-3 hour drive each way.
Thanks, the structured cabling keyword search does have a lot more hits.
Low Voltage tech here, telephone, computer networking and fire/burg alarms. I find most my work on 3rd party platforms, Field Nation for example is one of the largest 1099 markets to pair providers looking for technicians. Just be sure to screen the resources your looking for, because Field Nation doesn’t really validate anyone’s claim to skillsets.
I had the exact same experience.
Found companies that advertised residential networking and they were like, “Yeah, we do it as part of a new build with full automation.”
Ended up having to do it myself.
I also just ended up doing it myself.
But if it was something I had to hire out, I almost definitely would have had to just hire a normal electrician.
Any decent size IT services (or Managed Services Provider) can or has someone’s contact info on hand for this sort of thing. Security camera vendors also do it all the time, so they would likely be able to do it.
Don’t be surprised though if there’s a service call + $85-150/hr. for a single run. In OPs case, a MCOL area like the one we service should have been about 1/4-1/3 the total cost even for a professional low voltage shop.
out lv techs here are twice what an electrician costs.
I’ve always used an electrician, not sure how you hire a low voltage tech. Price was maybe 150 per drop ….so not too bad.
This.
I ended up teaching an electrician how to do the job right when they came to do some warranty work on a new home. I couldn’t believe what the guy didn’t know.