Day in the Life of an Electrician: Three Real Days

Alarm goes off. I hit snooze once, which is my one allowed weakness. The job's in Towson, about 25 minutes from my apartment in Hampden. I make coffee in a thermos. Peanut butter toast. I eat standing up because sitting down in the morning makes me want to go back to bed.

In the truck. The radio's on but I'm not listening. I'm thinking about the run I messed up yesterday. I bent a 90 into a piece of 3/4 EMT and the stub was two inches short. Quincy, my journeyman, made me do it again without saying anything. He just looked at the measurement and looked at me and I knew. I wasted a piece of conduit and about 20 minutes. That's $4 in material and $20 in labor. I know because Quincy tells me the cost of every mistake. He's not mean about it. He just believes in knowing what things cost.

Parked. Walked to the job trailer. The hospital addition is a four-story building being attached to the existing facility. We're on the second floor, roughing in patient rooms. Each room gets 14 outlets, a nurse call station, two data drops, overhead lighting, and a connection for the bed's headwall unit. Multiply that by 36 rooms and that's our scope for the next six weeks.

Safety meeting in the trailer. Our foreman Barb runs it. Today's topic is ladder safety. I've heard the ladder talk probably 15 times since I started. Barb says the reason she repeats it is because the people who get hurt on ladders are the ones who think they don't need the talk anymore. Fair enough. I drink my thermos coffee and listen.

On the floor. Quincy and I are running EMT conduit from the panel room on this floor to the patient rooms down the east corridor. The conduit runs above the drop ceiling grid, which isn't installed yet, so we're working in the open space between the concrete deck above and the metal studs below. I'm on a 10-foot ladder. Quincy is ahead of me by about 15 feet, marking the path. He snaps a chalk line on the concrete deck to give us a straight reference. I follow behind, mounting the conduit supports, these little metal clips called straps, every four feet.

We've mounted about 60 feet of conduit supports. Quincy hands me the bender and says "your turn." I'm bending the 90s today. He's watching but he's not hovering. The first one comes out clean. Three-inch stub, right on the mark. The second one I rush and the stub is an inch long. I can feel it before I check it. The bend just feels wrong in the bender. Quincy says nothing. I check with the tape. An inch long. "Again?" I ask. He nods. I cut a new piece and do it right. Third bend is perfect. Fourth one is close enough. "Close enough" is a thing Quincy says when it's within a quarter inch. A quarter inch matters. A half inch doesn't. I'm learning where that line is.

Break. Fifteen minutes. I sit on a bucket in the corridor and eat a granola bar. The plumber, a guy named Felix, is sitting on his own bucket about ten feet away. We nod at each other. We've been sharing this corridor for three weeks and we've had maybe four actual conversations, all about where our pipes and conduit are going. Felix's drain line is running right where Quincy wants to put our homerun conduit. They'll have to work it out. For now, we nod.

Back at it. Quincy sends me to the gang box to get a box of 3/4-inch couplings. The gang box is on the first floor. I walk down two flights of temporary stairs, dig through three drawers, find the couplings, walk back up. That trip took 12 minutes. This happens four or five times a day. If someone asked me what I do as an apprentice, "walking between floors carrying things" would be an honest answer for about 30% of my time.

Lunch. I eat in the truck because the trailer is crowded and it smells like microwaved fish every day, courtesy of somebody on the plumbing crew. Turkey sandwich, apple, a bag of Doritos. I call my mom for five minutes. She asks how work is. I say "good." She asks if I'm being safe. I say "yes." This is our daily conversation. It's exactly the same every day and I'd miss it if it stopped.

Afternoon. Quincy has me start pulling wire through the conduit we ran this morning. Wire pulling is exactly what it sounds like. You feed a fish tape through the conduit from one end, attach the wire to it, and pull it through from the other end. For short runs, I can do it alone. For long runs or bigger wire, Quincy feeds while I pull. Today's runs are 40 to 50 feet of #12 THHN, which is residential-weight wire but this hospital specifies it for the general outlets. It pulls easy. My hands get coated in wire pulling lubricant, this slippery gel that makes the wire slide through the conduit without binding.

The inspector walks the floor. Not here for us, he's checking the fire sprinkler rough-in. But I watch him work. He's got a flashlight and a clipboard and he's looking at every hanger, every joint, every head location. He finds something he doesn't like. I can tell because he stops walking and starts writing. The sprinkler foreman comes over. They talk for about five minutes. The foreman does not look happy. I think about my own conduit run and whether everything is right. I check two of my straps. They're at 48 inches on center, which is code. They're fine. I check them anyway.

Quincy sends me to help Barb with a different task. She needs someone to hold a piece of rigid conduit while she threads it. Rigid is the heavy stuff, steel pipe. Threading it means cutting threads onto the end with a threading machine so it can screw into a fitting. Barb runs the threader, I hold the pipe and catch the threads as they come off. The threading oil gets on my gloves and my sleeves. It's dark brown and it stains everything. I have a separate set of "threading clothes" that I only wear when I know we're threading. I did not know we were threading today. These are not the threading clothes.

Clean up. We sweep our area, put tools back in the gang box, lock everything up. The last 15 minutes of every day is cleaning. Barb is serious about leaving the floor clean. "We share this space," she says. "Leave it better than you found it." I sweep up copper shavings, drywall dust, and a surprising number of wire nuts. Where do all these wire nuts come from.

In the truck. Hands still smell like pulling lube and threading oil. I'll shower at home and the shower floor will have gray residue from the concrete dust in my hair. My roommate, who works at a software company from his bedroom, asked me once why my showers take 15 minutes. I told him it takes that long to get a construction site off your body. He said his biggest physical challenge today was that his monitor was at the wrong height. We get along fine.

Home. Shower. I'm studying for my second-year exam. The apprenticeship has classroom nights every other Tuesday and a test at the end of each year. Chapter 6 tonight: conductor sizing and overcurrent protection. I read for about 40 minutes, do the practice problems, get most of them right. The NEC table for conductor ampacity is something I'm starting to memorize without trying, which feels like a sign that I'm actually becoming an electrician and not just someone who carries couplings between floors.

Up before the sun because the sun in New Mexico is aggressive and we try to get the hard physical work done before it's 95 degrees. I'm staying in an extended-stay hotel in Albuquerque with three other guys from my company. The solar farm is about 40 minutes south, outside a town called Bosque Farms. My company is based in Phoenix. They put us up in the hotel and pay a $75 per diem on top of my hourly rate. The per diem is the reason I took this job. My base is $38 an hour. The per diem adds about $9 an hour if you spread it across an 8-hour day. So the effective rate is $47 an hour. That's real money.

Loading the truck at the hotel. My carpool is me, Archie, and Santos. Archie drives because he has the company truck. He's a foreman, been doing solar for six years. Santos is a fourth-year apprentice. He sleeps in the back seat for the entire drive. Every morning. I don't know how he does it. The road to the site is dirt for the last four miles and the truck bounces like a mechanical bull. Santos sleeps through it.

On site. This farm is 200 megawatts across about 1,200 acres. The scale is hard to describe until you're standing in it. Rows of solar panels extending to the horizon in every direction. The ground is packed dirt and scrub brush. There are no buildings. There's a job trailer, a porta-john row, and a laydown yard with materials. My crew is handling the medium-voltage cable from the inverters to the substation. We're pulling 15kV-rated cable through underground duct bank. The duct bank is a concrete-encased set of PVC conduits running about 3 feet underground. Each pull is about 600 feet.

Safety tailgate meeting. Archie runs it. Today's topics: heat illness prevention (drink water, recognize the signs, buddy system) and cable-pulling safety (don't stand in the bight of the rope, watch your hands near the sheaves). I've heard both talks dozens of times. I listen anyway because Archie is the kind of foreman who notices if you're not paying attention and he's right that complacency is what gets people hurt. I've seen one serious injury in nine years. A guy caught his hand in a pulling machine. Lost the tip of his ring finger. He was experienced. He was comfortable. He wasn't paying attention for three seconds.

Setting up the cable pull. This is a multi-step process. Santos and I position the cable reel on a reel stand at one end. Archie sets up the pulling machine at the other end, 600 feet away. We attach a pulling head to the cable, feed the pulling rope through the conduit using a blower (compressed air pushes a foam plug and the rope follows), then connect the rope to the pulling machine. The setup alone takes about 45 minutes. The actual pull takes 20 to 25 minutes. Then we do it again for the next conduit. There are six conduits in the duct bank and we're pulling cable in three of them today.

First pull. I'm at the reel end, guiding the cable off the reel as the machine pulls it from the other end. The cable is about 1.5 inches in diameter and weighs roughly 1.8 pounds per foot. Over 600 feet, that's over 1,000 pounds of cable being pulled through a conduit. The friction is intense even with lubricant. Santos applies cable lube as it feeds off the reel. My job is to make sure the cable doesn't kink or snag. The machine does the hard work. I do the watching-and-making-sure-nothing-goes-wrong work, which is a different kind of hard.

First pull complete. The cable came through clean. No snags, no kinks. The pulling tension stayed under 3,000 pounds, which is within spec. Archie records the tension on the pull sheet because the engineer will want documentation that we didn't exceed the cable's rated pulling tension. Everything in this job gets documented. Pull tensions, torque values on terminations, insulation resistance test readings. I write more in my work notebook on this job than I wrote in four years of high school.

Break. I sit in the shade of the job trailer because there is no other shade on this site. I drink half a liter of water and eat a bag of trail mix. The temperature is already 88 degrees. By noon it'll be 97. Archie tells Santos to drink more water. Santos says he's fine. Archie says it again, louder. Santos drinks water. This exchange happens every day.

Second pull. Same procedure. This one goes slower because there's a slight dog-leg in the duct bank, a bend about 200 feet in where the duct bank changes direction by about 15 degrees. The bend adds friction. The pulling tension creeps up to 2,800 pounds. Archie radios me to slow the feed rate. I ease back. The tension drops to 2,400. We finish the pull at 10:35. My hands are covered in cable lube, which is clear but slightly greasy. It gets on everything. My phone, my water bottle, my hard hat. There's a running joke that you can identify a cable puller by the grease fingerprints on their lunchbox.

Lunch. I eat in the truck with the AC running because the trailer doesn't have AC. Turkey wrap, chips, two bottles of water. I call my sister Kendall in Phoenix. She asks when I'm coming home. I tell her two more weeks. She says the dog misses me. I tell her the dog doesn't know I'm gone. She tells me I'm wrong. I'm probably wrong.

Afternoon. We switch to termination work. Archie and I are terminating the cables we pulled yesterday at the inverter pad. A termination is where the cable ends and connects to the equipment. For 15kV cable, the termination process is precise. You strip back the jacket, the shield, the insulation, each to a specific measurement. You install a stress cone, which manages the electric field at the termination point. You crimp a lug onto the conductor. Every step has a torque spec, a measurement, a test. I've done maybe 80 of these terminations in my career and I still use the installation manual every time because the consequences of doing it wrong are an arc flash at 15,000 volts.

Finished two terminations. Archie inspects both. He measures my shield cut-back distance with a ruler. It's at 1.25 inches. The spec says 1.25 plus or minus .125. He nods. We do a hi-pot test, which sends a high-voltage test signal through the cable to verify the insulation integrity. Both cables pass. These terminations will carry 15,000 volts for the next 25 years. That's a strange thought. I'll be 61 when these terminations are as old as I am now. The work outlasts the worker.

We're done for the day. Archie calls it early because the heat index is 104 and the safety plan says we stop when it hits 105. Close enough. We clean up tools, lock the gang box, load the truck. Santos falls asleep within three minutes of getting in the back seat. Archie and I talk about the schedule for tomorrow. Three more pulls, then we start on the grounding grid. I like grounding work because it's all copper and you can see the whole system laid out on the ground before you bury it. It's one of the few parts of this job where you can stand back and see what you built before it disappears underground.

Hotel. Shower. The water runs brown for the first minute from the dust. I order a burrito from a place Archie recommended. $9.50. The per diem covers it with plenty left over. That's the deal with travel work: you live cheap, pocket the difference, and count the days until you go home. I'm 11 days into a 28-day rotation. I FaceTime my girlfriend Celina in Phoenix. She shows me the dog. Kendall was right. The dog does miss me.

Getting my daughter Petra, she's 8, ready for school. My husband Aleks drops her off at 7:30. I load the van while they're eating cereal. I check the dispatch app on my phone. Four calls today. Panel upgrade in Westerville, outlet troubleshoot in Gahanna, ceiling fan install in Dublin, and an EV charger estimate in New Albany. Good spread. The panel upgrade will take most of the morning. The rest are quick turns if nothing weird comes up. Something weird always comes up.

Driving to the first call. The van is a 2019 Ram ProMaster. It's the company's. My boss Stan bought it new and it's the nicest vehicle in the fleet, which is why I take care of it. My tools are organized in bins that I bought myself because the stock shelving is garbage. Everything has a place. When I reach for my Fluke T5 voltage tester, it's always in the same spot on the left shelf, third hook from the front. This took me about a year to set up and I will not let anyone else drive this van.

Westerville. The homeowner, Mrs. Okonkwo, has a 1978 ranch house with the original 100-amp panel. She's upgrading to 200 amps because she got an insurance letter saying her Federal Pacific panel is a liability. I've done about 40 panel swaps. The process is routine but every house is different. In Mrs. Okonkwo's case, the panel is in the basement in a corner behind the water heater. Access is tight. I'll be working with about two feet of clearance on one side.

Called the utility to schedule the meter disconnect. They'll pull the meter and I'll do the swap and they'll come back to set the new meter. The utility says between 9 and noon. That means I'm waiting. I start prep work: labeling every circuit in the old panel, testing each one to confirm what it feeds, documenting the existing wiring. Mrs. Okonkwo brings me a glass of water without me asking. I thank her. She hovers for about five minutes asking questions about Federal Pacific panels. I explain that the breakers have a documented failure rate and that the upgrade is a good call. She seems relieved to hear it from a person instead of an insurance letter.

Utility guy shows up. Pulls the meter. The house goes dark. Mrs. Okonkwo gasps even though I told her this would happen. I start the swap. Remove the dead front cover. Disconnect each circuit. Remove the old panel. It comes off the wall with the particular stubbornness of something that's been screwed into concrete block for 46 years. Two of the four mounting screws are so corroded they just spin. I drill them out. The old panel goes in the van. I mount the new Square D 200-amp panel. It's heavier, bigger, and it fits beautifully in the same spot because I measured three times last week during the estimate.

Circuits are landed. I'm re-terminating each wire onto new breakers. Some of the old wiring is cloth-wrapped, which is original 1978 NM cable. The cloth insulation is dry and crumbly in places. I'm careful not to nick the conductor underneath. One wire, the one feeding the kitchen, has a splice in the wall that I can see through the panel opening. The splice is wrapped in electrical tape and it's not in a junction box. That's a code violation. I mention it to Mrs. Okonkwo. She says she didn't know. I tell her I can fix it for an additional $175. She says yes. I pull the splice out, put it in a proper box, and re-connect it with wire nuts. That splice has been in that wall for probably 30 years. Somebody did it without a box, which is illegal, and it worked fine until now, which is the story of about half the houses I work in. Code violations that work fine until the day they don't.

Utility comes back to set the new meter. Power's restored. I test every circuit. Everything works. Mrs. Okonkwo's microwave clock is flashing 12:00, which means her power was out for about two and a half hours. I update the dispatch app: panel swap complete, additional junction box repair, total invoice $4,850. I eat a granola bar in the van and head to Gahanna.

Gahanna. Homeowner says three outlets in the living room don't work. I check the breakers. Everything's on. I test the dead outlets. No voltage. This is the detective part of the job. I trace the circuit. The living room outlets are on a 15-amp circuit that also feeds two outlets in the hallway. The hallway outlets work. So the break is between the hallway and the living room. I pull the cover off the last working outlet and find a backstab connection that's come loose. Backstabs are those push-in connectors on the back of cheap outlets. They're allowed by code but they're notorious for loosening over time. I redo the connection with a side-wire terminal, which uses a screw clamp. Test the living room outlets. All three are live. Total time: 30 minutes. I charge $165 for the service call. The homeowner looks at me like $165 for 30 minutes is a lot. It is. It's also 14 years of experience compressed into 30 minutes. I don't say that. I just hand him the invoice.

Dublin. Ceiling fan install. Straightforward. The homeowner bought the fan from Lowe's and tried to install it himself. He got as far as removing the old light fixture and realizing the junction box in the ceiling wasn't rated for a fan. He's right, it wasn't. I install a fan-rated box, which requires going into the attic and bracing it between the joists. The attic is about 120 degrees and I can only crouch, not stand. I sweat through my shirt in about eight minutes. I install the box, run the wires down, and mount the fan. The homeowner could have done this if he'd known about the box issue. But he didn't, so here I am, soaked in sweat, installing a Hampton Bay ceiling fan in a 120-degree attic on a Monday afternoon. This is the glamour of the trades.

New Albany. EV charger estimate. This one is just a measurement and assessment. The homeowner has a 200-amp panel in the basement with four open slots. He wants a 48-amp ChargePoint unit in the garage. The panel is about 30 feet from the garage, straight shot through the basement ceiling and up through the wall. I measure the run, check his load calculation to make sure his panel can handle the additional 60-amp breaker without overloading the service, and write up the estimate in the van. $2,800 installed. He says he'll let me know. I give him two weeks mentally before he either calls back or goes with someone cheaper.

Heading home. I stop for gas and a Coke. I call Stan to report the day. Four calls, three completed, one estimate. $5,190 in invoiced work plus a pending $2,800 estimate. Stan says "nice day." For Stan, that's effusive praise. He's not a talker. I appreciate that about him.

Home. Petra runs to me at the door. Aleks is making chicken and rice. I shower, change, and sit on the couch. Petra asks me what I did today. I tell her I fixed a house's electricity. She says "cool" and goes back to her iPad. That's the summary. Eight hours of conduit, wire, code, sweat, driving, and troubleshooting, reduced to "fixed a house's electricity." She's not wrong. That's exactly what I did. I just wish there was a way to explain the 120-degree attic and the 46-year-old panel and the backstab connection without it sounding like I'm just complaining. It's not a complaint. It's the texture of the day. But an 8-year-old doesn't need the texture. "Cool" is enough.