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THE IMPORTANCE OF HIRING LICENSED ELECTRICIANS
A Common Claim
Anyone can claim to be an electrician, and many do. While it's not legally proper, there is often little to no repercussion for an unqualified person to make this claim. They have no license to be revoked after all! Most homeowners decline to pull a permit and get their work inspected, and as such there is no one in the loop to ensure they are actually getting professional services for the money they are paying.
Electrical licensing in Illinois is done at the local level, which further complicates this situation. There is no state-wide licensing for most trades here, and every city and county manages its own registries, with its own peculiar requirements. It's difficult to even look up!
David's Credentials
I have ten years of experience in the trade, including fulfilling a five-year apprenticeship, schooling, and I have passed all the requirements to become a registered electrical contractor in the City of Naperville, my primary service area. This includes things that many "electricians" of Angie's List and Craigslist fame don't have: liability insurance of up to $2,000,000; bonding for $10,000; and certification from a nationally recognized organization, the ICC; oh, and an actual copy and understanding of the code book...
The Concern
Many people think they understand electricity, but the sad truth is that most vastly overestimate their skills and knowledge. Electricity is not that simple! It took humanity many thousands of years to harness the power of electrons, and even then there were many mistakes and catastrophes along the way to where we currently stand with the present National Electrical Code. But even the "simple" acts of installing receptacle outlets can lead to basic mistakes, which might appear proper to an unaware installer or homeowner, but are in fact troubling and can lead down the road to fires and shocks.
I cannot count the number of times I have gone to take off a receptacle, only to find wires simply falling off of it and coming totally undone behind the wall. This is an active fire risk - those loose connections can become very hot, as chokepoints in the conductive path create rapid heat rises which a standard circuit breaker will not recognize as a fault. These chokepoints, under full load, can be white hot and lead to a meltdown inside your walls. The same is true for light switches and every other device wired into your home. Poor workmanship, often due to simple ignorance on account of a lack of experience and training, can result in improperly torqued connections that come loose over time, or basic code mistakes that your Angie's List "professional" wasn't aware of.
These loose connections, when they happen to a neutral, can in time cause the splice to break apart from thermal cycling, at which point your 120V circuits can suddenly turn into 240V circuits, frying sensitive electronics and lights throughout your house, not to mention exposing you and your family to doubly deadly potential.
Further issues can be caused by miswiring: swapping neutrals or combining all neutrals, improper grounding, objectionable current paths, and more. These can create electrocution hazards along with less serious but very bedeviling malfunctions of common household equipment.
There are countless ways to improperly install electrical wiring, and the code book currently is heavy enough to count as a lethal weapon in some places! There is a lot in there that an untrained "electrician" simply will not know, because they've never even opened one. You deserve better, even if nothing ill comes of your "handyman electrician", the money you spend should be spent on actual licensed professionals with expertise in what they're being paid to do.
Make sure the people you hire to do electrical work on your home have the experience, training, and credentials to do so. Even if you do not hire David's, hire someone who won't put you and your family at risk just because.