I have a friend/homeowner and ask me to wire a house he suggest i charge
him by the hour so I wouldnt under bid he has no plans no material and no Idea what he wants as far as lighting, resceptacles and appliances. he also wants me to run phone/cable. Well needles to say its been two weeeks and I
still haven't had ruff in inspection becuase of his undecidedness. He seems not to care but as an electrician I am not happy with the progress i feel i should be done.What would you guys charge for a job that had no plans, layout,1800sqft house with front /back porchs 70'x12'. with fans/light/recpt, and car port.This guy most of the time just cant make up his mind about placement of appliances I thing I have had to redo everything twice including
service location.
From years of experience with the above, by all means time and materials. I can bet you that as you proceed through the job the owner will want you to move stuff or add stuff or take stuff out.
I have only done one job where the outlets were on a print. All the rest I either put where I would like them to be or the owner just did a verbal about what was important and let me do the rest. I like it that way. I don't put receptacles on lighting circuits and I hate to daisy chain boxes as I don't like using a device box as a junction box. I also alternate rooms on lighting circuits so if one room goes dark, the adjacent rooms are still lit.
Install chases if you can for both power and low voltage running from the basement to the attic. Someday you will thank me for that!
Don't forget about the rules for AFCI's. ANY circuit in a bedroom must be protected by them, even the smoke detector circuit. This is the one area that I end up putting the lights and receptacles on the same outlet due to the cost of AFCI's. This is overcome if there are enough bedrooms to require multiple circuits, though. Just put bedroom lighting on one circuit and feed the smokes from there and you are good to go. Put the receptacles on different circuits.
As far as bids, no way. I did a time and material job on an 1800 foot home and the bill came to nearly 14,000 dollars. There were 9 light switches in the foyer and all out door lighting had switches at each door as well as near some of the windows. I move one light fixture 4 times because the wifoid kept changing her mind. She also kept moving my materials and I charged for hunting them down or driving to a big box store to get more after I couldn't find them. They had an 18 foot vaulted ceiling that needed a huge chandelier. There were Cat 5 runs as well as RG-6 and TX to every room in the house. There are 50 breakers in the basement plus the garage has a panel with 12 more. The basement had a bath and a half, a dog grooming studio, two finished bedrooms, a living room area and a full kitchen. The other half of the basement had the utilities.
Even though all of the above was initially designed on CAD and given to me, the constant changes and 'internal' problems wiped out any chance of figuring out an accurate bid.
The best way for most is to start wiring for code minimum and take the owner through periodically to approve the placements and suggest others.
Also, we have a certain time frame to get a rough in inspection done. You may find it prudent to inform the owner that he doesn't have all the time in the world to make a decision. Make sure you have paperwork from the inspection department with the time limitation in hand.
Good luck.
