Marks Electric generally gets good ratings for the two-hour get-in-and-go projects, but I hired them to do a full renovation, including installing lights, outlets, and switches throughout. The organization required to do that scale of work was lacking.
There was about 30 hours of work to be done, and the person assigned to the job, Rick, stretched that over three months. This caused conflicts with another contractor: you can't put up the drywall until the electrical is in, and there are ton of things that you can't do until the drywall is up, so if the electrician isn't showing up, you have a team of people sitting on their hands. Eventually, the drywall went up without the electrical, and then Rick complained to me that he had to cut holes in the wall to fish the lines through, and then the other contractor complained to me that somebody just cut holes all over his drywall that now he had to patch. This sort of failure
to do relatively simple coordination repeated itself a few times.
I called Mark about the no-shows and lack of communication somewhere in there. Mark told me that Rick's performance is between me and Rick, and he's staying out of it. So the company's named "Mark's electric", but Mark was explicit to me that he's not responsible for the behavior of his employees. That phone conversation is why I'm writing this review.
On the plus side, the work was fundamentally competent: the sub-panel they installed works, most of the lights come on, and the house hasn't burned down.
Since then, I've re-hung the chandelier they installed, because it seemed wrong to me that they used the ground wire to bear the load of the light instead of using the chain to bear the load. There's a vestibule entrance to the house, and I hired another electrician to move the light from where Rick put it, just outside the vestibule, to the more natural placement inside, as per the architect's drawings. I've removed a motion sensor at the top of a staircase that senses motion in a nearby hallway but not on the stairs. I discussed the mis-placement with Mark's electrician at the time, and he wasn't inclined to fix it. The light fixture for that one fell out of the plaster after a few weeks, so I had somebody re-hang that too.
Still on my to-do list: re-install the fan in the living room, which never worked, even the day after Rick's team installed it; rewire two light fixtures that just stopped working one day; and redo a circuit for a hall light that recently stopped working. read more
