Electrical Estimating Services for Contractors Across Canada

Here's the thing. A receptacle is a receptacle when you're buying it. Installing one isn't. The same device takes a different amount of time at 3 metres than at 8, in open ceiling than in hard ceiling, in new construction than in an occupied retrofit where you're working nights and moving furniture. Apply one flat rate across all of it and you've priced some of the job at a loss and some of it out of contention. The two won't cancel out.

So we apply labour by assembly. Each counted item carries its own installation time, adjusted for the conditions on your drawings: mounting height, ceiling type, new build or retrofit, how accessible the run is once the walls close.

Retrofit work is where this bites hardest. On a new build the trade ahead of you leaves an open ceiling and a clear floor. In an occupied building you're pulling through existing ceilings and matching into distribution somebody else installed twenty years ago and didn't document. The device count might read identical. The hours are nowhere close.

Homeruns are the usual culprit. A device count tells you there are forty receptacles on that floor. It tells you nothing about how far each circuit travels to reach the panel, and on a large or awkwardly shaped floor plate that distance is a lot of wire and a lot of hours. We measure homeruns off the drawings rather than applying an average length, because the average is wrong on exactly the jobs where being wrong is expensive.

Feeders are the other one. Fewer in number, so easy to skim past, and large enough that missing one shows up immediately on your margin. Every feeder gets measured and sized against the panel schedule.

Risers get skipped too, especially on multi-storey work. Vertical distribution between floors is easy to overlook when you're working floor by floor through a set, and it's rarely trivial. We take risers off as their own scope and tie them back to the gear they feed.

Then there's what isn't drawn. Electrical drawings are diagrammatic more often than not, and the route a conduit actually takes is rarely the straight line on the page. Nobody can price a route that hasn't been designed yet, but everybody can price the risk of it if somebody points it out first.

Lighting controls are the grey area that catches people. A drawing might show occupancy sensors and dimmers as devices, which reads like standard rough-in. If the job actually calls for a networked control system with a panel, programming and commissioning, that's a different scope with a different cost. We split device-level work from system-level work so you can see which you're being asked to carry.

You can change any of that. Tell us what's in your scope and we build the takeoff to match. What we won't do is quietly include something you were not planning to carry, or quietly leave out something you were. Where fire alarm work runs into fire-rated assemblies and penetrations, that's a different trade again, and our fireproofing estimating covers it.

Bidding electrical on its own, or buying the whole package? This page is for contractors bidding electrical alone. If you need mechanical, electrical and plumbing priced together as one coordinated scope, our MEP estimating service handles all three and focuses on where they collide. Bidding just the mechanical side is our mechanical estimating, and plumbing sits on its own page too.