Questions we get asked

Yes. Monfett Electric LLC is a licensed electrical contractor in Massachusetts and carries liability insurance. The license number is in the footer of every page, and we are happy to send a certificate of insurance to any homeowner, dealer or property manager who wants one on file.

West Springfield, Springfield, Agawam, Longmeadow, Chicopee, Holyoke and Westfield. West Springfield is home, so it usually gets the fastest response. For work just outside that list it is worth calling, particularly for pool, spa and generator jobs.

No charge to come out and quote work of any size. Diagnostic work is different, because finding the fault is the job, and we will tell you what that costs before starting rather than after.

Call and you will get a straight answer about how soon we can be there. We would rather tell you honestly that tomorrow morning is the earliest than promise tonight and not turn up. If it is a burning smell, a hot panel or water reaching electrical equipment, shut the power off at the main and call the fire department first.

Pool work is where my career started. I began in Florida, where swimming pools are year-round rather than seasonal work, doing several installations a day before returning to western Massachusetts. Pool electrical in the Pioneer Valley is seasonal, so most local shops handle a small number each year; this is the work I have done most.

Bonding ties every metal part in and around a pool together with solid copper so that no two surfaces a swimmer can touch are ever at different voltages. It covers the pool shell reinforcing steel, ladders and rails, the pump motor, metal fittings and the water itself. Bonding is not the same as grounding, and a pool needs both. It is required by Article 680 of the National Electrical Code, and it is the single most common thing we find missing on older pools.

Almost never. A standard 240 volt spa needs its own dedicated circuit, GFCI protection and a disconnect that you can see from the tub but cannot reach from inside it. Some smaller plug in spas run on 120 volts, but they still want a dedicated circuit rather than sharing one with the garage. Running a spa on an extension cord or an existing outlet is the usual reason a hot tub delivery ends with a failed inspection.

Yes. Pool, spa and hot tub electrical work requires an electrical permit and an inspection in every town we serve. We pull the permit under our license and meet the inspector, so it is not something you need to arrange.

Usually yes. Most older incandescent pool lights can be replaced with an LED fixture in the existing niche, which cuts the load considerably and lasts far longer. It is a good moment to check the bonding and the GFCI protection on that circuit, because a light change is often the first time anyone has looked at either in twenty years.

The panel is rarely the expensive part. Cost turns on whether the service entrance, meter socket and mast are being replaced too, whether the utility connection is overhead or underground, how the grounding needs to be brought up to date, and how many circuits have to be identified and re landed. A panel swap on a sound service is a much smaller job than a full service upgrade to 200 amps. We look at the meter and the mast before quoting.

Most panel and service upgrades are a single day, with power off for the bulk of it. The utility has to disconnect and reconnect, and the inspection happens between the two, so the day is scheduled around their windows rather than ours. We tell you the night before what time to expect the lights to go out.

Both have a long documented history of breakers that fail to trip under fault conditions, which defeats the one job a breaker has. Neither is recalled, and plenty are still in service, but most electricians recommend replacement and a growing number of insurance carriers ask for it. If you have one, it is worth knowing before your carrier tells you.

In the Eversource towns, a panel or service upgrade can qualify for the Mass Save HEAT Loan at zero interest when it clears the way for electrification such as a heat pump, an EV charger or an induction range. Three of the towns we serve, Chicopee, Holyoke and Westfield, are on municipal utilities rather than Eversource, so Mass Save does not apply there and the municipal programs take its place. Terms change annually and are worth confirming with the utility before you plan around them.

Undisturbed knob and tube in good condition is not automatically hazardous, and a great deal of it has run quietly for decades. The problems come from what gets done to it: blown in insulation packed around conductors that need open air to shed heat, decades of amateur splices, and the absence of any ground in the system. Most insurance carriers now treat it as a defect, and some will not write a policy over it.

Not on its own. A two prong outlet means the circuit has no ground, and fitting a three prong receptacle to it creates an outlet that looks protected and is not. The code does allow a GFCI at the head of the circuit with the downstream outlets labelled as having no equipment ground, which is a legitimate interim answer. The real fix is a new circuit, and which route makes sense depends on how many circuits are affected.

Usually yes. Whole house rewires are normally staged room by room or floor by floor so that most of the house keeps power most of the time. It is dusty and disruptive work and there will be days without power in the area being worked on, but people live through it routinely. Apartment rewires are different and we aim to bring a unit back the same day.

Often not, but it has to be checked rather than assumed. The deciding factor is a load calculation on the existing service, not the size of the panel. Many homes with a 200 amp service take a charger with no changes. A 100 amp service, or a panel with no spaces left, may need a subpanel or a service upgrade first. We run the calculation before quoting.

The charger itself is a small part of it. Cost is driven by the distance from the panel to where the car parks, whether the run is through finished space, whether the service has capacity, and whether the install is indoors or outdoors. A charger on the garage wall directly behind the panel is a straightforward job. One at the far end of a detached garage is a different one. We quote after seeing both ends of the run.

Yes. A new 240 volt circuit requires an electrical permit and inspection in the towns we serve. We handle both.

It depends on what you want running, and the useful exercise is to write that list before shopping. A well pump, heating system, refrigerator, freezer, a few lights and some outlets will carry a household through an outage comfortably, and that list fits a much smaller unit on a critical loads subpanel. Running the whole house including central air and an electric range needs considerably more. We size the generator to the list rather than to the square footage.

A transfer switch is what separates your house from the utility while the generator is running. Without one, power can flow back down the line toward crews working to restore it. Backfeeding a house through a dryer outlet or a similar arrangement is dangerous and illegal, and it is the reason transfer switches are not optional. Automatic switches sense the outage and start the generator; manual switches cost much less and you operate them yourself.

Usually not the whole house, but more than people expect. Wired through a manual transfer switch to a critical loads subpanel, a decent portable unit will cover heat, water, refrigeration and lighting. What it will not cover is central air conditioning, an electric range and electric water heating all at once. Deciding what goes on that subpanel is the part of the job worth spending time on.

It depends almost entirely on linear footage and how much of the roofline you want covered, plus how the eave is built and where the controller and circuit can go. A front elevation only is a much smaller job than a full wrap. We quote on site after measuring, and we will tell you if covering less of the house gets you most of the effect.

Permanent lighting is installed once, wired to its own circuit and controller, and stays on the house year round. In daylight the track reads as trim. It does warm white for ordinary evenings and colour for holidays, all from an app or a schedule, and nobody goes up a ladder in December or takes anything down in January.

Properly installed low voltage lighting is designed to. What fails is usually the install rather than the fixtures: shallow buried runs cut by an edger or a plough, connections that were not made watertight, and transformers mounted where snow piles against them. Fixtures also need to sit high enough that they are not buried by the first real storm.

Generally both, doing different jobs. A photocell or astronomic timer handles the lighting you want on every evening, following sunset through the year. A motion sensor handles the lighting you only want when someone is there, such as a side door or a driveway. Putting everything on motion is the usual mistake, because a house where every light snaps on and off all night looks unoccupied rather than lit.

A smart switch has to stay powered even when the light is off, so it needs a return path, and that is the neutral. Many older switch boxes in this area only have the hot and the switch leg, with no neutral present. There are switches designed to work without one, and there are cases where a neutral can be pulled to the box. We check the box before recommending anything.

Properly installed, nothing important. Smart switches control the circuit rather than the bulb, so the switch on the wall keeps working normally whatever the network is doing. Schedules stored in the switch or the timer keep running. What you lose is app control and remote access until the connection returns.

A single fixture flickering is usually the bulb, the fixture or a dimmer that was never right for the load. Lights flickering across the whole house, or dimming when a large appliance starts, points at something further upstream: a loose neutral, a failing connection in the panel, or a problem at the service. The whole house version is worth looking at promptly rather than living with.

A breaker doing its job is telling you something. The common causes are a genuine overload from too much on one circuit, a failing appliance, a damaged cable, or moisture reaching an outdoor circuit. Repeated resetting is not a fix, and a breaker that trips with nothing obviously running is the version worth investigating rather than ignoring.

Only if the box supports it. A standard lighting box is not built to carry the weight and the movement of a fan, and fitting one to it is a common cause of fans working loose. The fix is a fan rated box braced to the framing, which we fit as part of the install.