Kevin was able to come out quickly, and I appreciated that. I had a circuit that included some…read morelight fixtures, 2 GFI outlets and a few regular outlets that were out. He came and investigated - granted, the wiring in my house is a bit tangled, but Kevin started opening up all the outlets/light switches - one of the GFI outlets clearly had a black wire that was disconnected - and gave me the diagnosis that I had a "lost neutral." As he explained to me, a Lost Neutral is an enormous problem and apparently requires an electrician team to fix. So in other words, he wouldn't be able to fix the issue today, and I would have to call a huge team over.
Then, as he was putting all the outlets back, he reconnected one of the GFI outlets and everything started working. I asked him, what did you do? He joked "Magic." I said "are you sure it isn't because you reconnected that disconnected black wire on the GFI outlet?" He said "No, I don't know, I think I fixed it when I was tweaking with one of the other outlets." I wasn't happy about this answer, because why would you scare me for 1.5 hours with a diagnosis of a "lost neutral" when my actual problem was clearly a GFI outlet disconnection?
He charged me $200, which isn't unreasonable if the issue was actually resolved. But right after he left, the power went out on the circuit again. At the time, I was stressed, so I asked Kevin to come back, but he said he could only come back the next morning. So my friend came by and I told him the story.
After hearing the story, my friend who's not even an electrician, but knows how to install light fixtures, suggested, "What if we just replaced the GFI outlet?" So we went to Lowes, bought a new outlet for $20, came back, replaced it, and voila - everything was working, and has been for the past 2 days since Kevin left.
So a "lost neutral" diagnosis turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration, and while I appreciate Kevin's clearly helpful intention, and the fact that he didn't try to upsell me on some kind of big house project, I was slightly incredulous by the fact that the resolution turned out to be a simple GFI outlet replacement, rather than a grandiose "Lost Neutral" disaster.
The fact that my unlicensed friend was able to suggest a fix that ended up proving Kevin's lost neutral theory incorrect, I'm not 100% happy with this experience. Still I'll give 4 stars for effort, honest intentions, and doing the diagnostic that eventually led us to a result, but definitely deducting a star for the cost and not finding the correct fix.