Changing a light fitting is not electrical work in any meaningful sense. Adding a circuit, moving a panel or touching anything behind a wall is — and that is where the licence stops being paperwork and starts being the point.
The licence is a code question, not a skill question
Plenty of capable people can wire an outlet correctly. Far fewer can tell you which article of the current code governs it, what your jurisdiction amended, and what an inspector will fail.
New Mexico and Colorado license electricians separately and adopt code revisions on their own schedules. Work that passed five years ago may not pass now, and that matters at exactly two moments: inspection, and a claim.
What uninsured work actually costs
A licensed contractor carries liability insurance. If their work causes a fire, that is covered. If uninsured work causes a fire, the loss is yours — and your own insurer may decline it on the grounds the work was unpermitted.
This is the part people discover afterwards. Ask for the licence number and proof of insurance before the work, not after.
Water and electricity is not a DIY situation
If a room has flooded, do not enter the water to deal with it. Submerged outlets, appliances and anything hardwired at floor level can energise standing water, and the hazard is invisible.
This is one reason our restoration crews include electricians: somebody has to make the room safe before anybody extracts anything. A restoration company without electrical capability has to wait for one.
What an annual check is looking for
Panel condition and breaker function, GFCI and AFCI protection where the code now requires it, signs of heat at terminations, and the quiet damage that older aluminium branch circuits do over decades.
None of these announce themselves. A breaker that trips occasionally is doing its job and telling you something; a connection warming up behind a cover plate tells you nothing at all until it fails.
The honest limits of a service visit
An electrician cannot meaningfully reduce your power bill by inspecting your wiring — that is an insulation, appliance and usage question, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
What a visit genuinely does is find the faults that get worse unseen, and confirm the parts of the system that protect you still work. That is a smaller claim than the marketing usually makes, and it is the true one.
Want this looked at?
M&R covers Farmington and the surrounding Four Corners, with emergency crews on call 24/7.