Electrical work across Santa Cruz County

Every city and unincorporated area in the county, from Davenport to Pajaro Dunes. Same crew, same 20-year workmanship guarantee, same licensed C-10 scope.

Permits and inspections

Which building department signs off on your job depends on where the house sits, not on what the work is. The County of Santa Cruz is the authority having jurisdiction for the unincorporated county, and that covers most of where we work — the San Lorenzo Valley, the Live Oak and Pleasure Point coast, Mid-County through Soquel and Aptos, the North Coast, and the Pajaro Valley. Santa Cruz, Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville each run their own building department inside their city limits. Same California Electrical Code either way; different counter, different queue, different inspector.

Adding a circuit, moving one, replacing a panel or changing the service is permitted work, and that includes the jobs homeowners are most often told otherwise about — panel replacements, service upgrades and EV circuits among them. We pull the permit from whichever department applies, so working out which one that is never becomes your problem. It is part of the job rather than a line you discover afterwards.

Permitted work gets inspected before it is signed off. We schedule the inspection, meet the inspector on site, and deal with any correction notice ourselves. The County and the four cities each run their own scheduling, so the lead time belongs to them rather than to us — what we control is being ready when the slot comes, and not leaving you to chase it.

Anything that touches the incoming service — a panel replacement, a service upgrade, a meter relocation — has to be coordinated with PG&E as well as with the building department. That is two schedules for one job, and they have to line up in the right order. We handle both. PG&E's own timing is the part of a service job that nobody on site controls, which is worth knowing before you plan around a date.

The county is several different electrical environments within a short drive, and the failure modes differ more than the code does. On the coast — Davenport through Live Oak, Pleasure Point, Rio del Mar and La Selva Beach — salt air works on terminations and enclosures, and it usually shows at the meter and the panel first. In the San Lorenzo Valley, redwood canopy over long spans means tree contact, and public safety power shutoffs are a normal part of the year rather than an exception, which is what makes backup worth planning rather than improvising. South County and the Pajaro Valley add agricultural services and outbuildings. The right questions are not the same in Boulder Creek as they are in Rio del Mar.

Start with your city,

Neighborhoods we work in