Safer Greenbelt
Unbiased electrical consultation.
"What Do You Charge?"
RATES and HOURS
You get to choose how exhaustively your wiring is to be examined and how much time you want to invest for advice. Your choices determine how much you pay Safer Greenbelt—you pay by the hour. Houses and owner situations vary too much for a cookie-cutter approach with fixed bids to perform safety surveys, to lay out jobs, to prepare specifications, or to review plans, proposals, or educational materials. That's why home inspectors, who do offer a fixed fee, refer homeowners to trade specialists when they find something fishy.
Of course you can change
your mind about how deep a look is worth your while,
based on initial discoveries. For examples, visit
How Deep Shall We Dig? Customers' Choices
Basic Fees
For most work Safer Greenbelt takes on, the charge is
$150 an hour, from the time we leave
for your work site till the end of the day.
When the consultation is not on site, the rate's usually the same: $150 an hour, $50 per
20 minutes. That's counted from the time we start talking on the phone
till we stop.
Exceptions There are a few situations in which the rate's $200 an hour,
$50 per 15 minutes:
- Preparing written reports;
- Providing testimony or depositions;
- Technical research and consultation for inventors, designers, publishers, legislators, or litigators;
- Emergency, temporary repair, in the rare case Safer Greenbelt will take on.
For the duration of the current havoc, the rates are lower for federal workers who lost their jobs due to the recent pattern of intimidation and firings: $125 an hour for normal consultation, and $175 an hour for work that normlly would cost $200 an hour.
After the first hour on site, charges prorate to the nearest quarter hour. Remote consultation? Once we reach a cumulative quarter-hour, in one phone call or three, there's a charge. The same is true when we mix in email correspondence; the example below mixed the two. You can call or email for the purpose of planning work, for help understanding electrical safety rules, or when you're seeking suggestions for tracking down problems on your own. Of course however well-intentioned and learned the advice, notwithstanding the fact that time spent offering advice is billed, you bear full responsibility for what you do or don't do, given that you're the one onsite, making your own choices, rather than a closely supervised subordinate.
What could I end up paying?
That depends on what you need. Need to talk for 20 minutes? Need a visit in which we spend an hour or so looking at your system, or several hours examining it in greater detail? Big difference. You hire for the expertise; you pay for the time—at the end of each day.
Let's make that more concrete: like to see a real bill from Fall, 2024 paying for the time that went into several email and phone conversations? Here's the paid bill, of course redacted.
Business Hours.
Normal field hours run between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, excluding holidays. Sometimes we can schedule work outside these hours. Normally field time in any one day is limited to a maximum of six and a half hours.
Payment Terms
Payment is due right away, at the time services are rendered. You can pay using cash or a valid first-party check; no plastic, no crypto.
It's that simple.Following the week of work, payment is overdue. Interest is charged on any outstanding balance at the monthly rate associated with overdue credit card balances. Collection costs, including legal fees, accrue to unpaid bills. Non-payment, or a bounced check that isn't corrected as soon as you're informed, can mean a property lien. (Thankfully, that proved necessary only once in nearly 45 years.)
A non-intuitive point about inspection and consultation:
Because no inspection is exhaustive (and because of the benefits of what psychologists call distributed exposure) future visits or reviews, by any inspector, may discover concerns that were not picked up during earlier consultations.
We have to balance the sometimes-conflicting goals of ensuring your safety while respecting your budget constraints.
Initial Contact:email Safer Greenbelt
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Greenbelt brings to mind . . .
