Electrical Guides From the Field
Marc Reeves Marc Reeves · June 23, 2026
Every spring, I get at least a dozen calls from homeowners who’ve made the same mistake: they bought a bag of landscape lights, shoved the stakes into the ground, and ended up with half the lights flickering or completely dead by August. The problem is almost never the lights themselves. It’s the wiring. If you’re … Read more
Marc Reeves · June 22, 2026
A few years back, I got a call from a homeowner in a panic. His outdoor GFCI outlet had tripped and wouldn’t reset. When I showed up, I found a standard flip-lid cover — the kind that only protects an empty outlet — with a phone charger cord snaking out from underneath it. Water had … Read more
Marc Reeves · June 21, 2026
I want to tell you about the day I nearly grabbed a live wire because my non-contact voltage tester said it was dead. I was pulling out an old double-pole breaker in a residential panel — a job I’d done hundreds of times. My tester showed no voltage. I reached in. Something felt wrong, so … Read more
Marc Reeves · June 20, 2026
Here’s something I hear at least twice a month: “Marc, I just want to know if this outlet is live before I touch it.” That’s it. That’s the whole ask. I didn’t own a proper non-contact voltage tester for way too long, and in that gap I made some genuinely dumb decisions around live wires … Read more
Marc Reeves · June 19, 2026
The question of smart plug vs smart switch when to use each comes up constantly in my work. Just last month, a homeowner called me frustrated — she’d bought four smart switches for her living room lamps, hired someone to install them, and then discovered none of those lamps were hardwired. They all plugged into … Read more