New construction electrical for custom homes.

What this is

The electrical trade on a custom home, done by people who have done it for thirty years.

A custom home is a different job from a service call. The electrical contractor is on the site for months, works inside another company's schedule, and is judged on whether the inspections pass the first time and whether drywall ever has to wait. County Line Electric was built for that job. Jeff Tucker has been wiring custom homes in the Conejo Valley, Malibu, the Westside and Santa Barbara County since the 1990s, for general contractors who put the company on the next set of plans without being asked.

The work covers everything with a wire in it: temporary power, the service entrance and panels, rough-in, the low-voltage backbone, lighting control, the standby generator, EV charging, finish and trim, and the final with the inspector. On a house with a lighting designer, an integrator or an architect who cares about where every fixture lands, County Line sits in those meetings and makes the drawings buildable.

Scope

What County Line carries on a custom home.

• Temporary power and utility coordination (SCE, LADWP, PG&E where applicable)
• Service entrance, main and sub panels, load calculations sized for generators, EV and electrified kitchens
• Complete rough-in: branch circuits, home runs, boxes, recessed and linear fixture framing coordination
• Low-voltage backbone: structured wiring, network, audio and video paths, security and camera pathways
• Lutron HomeWorks lighting control and Ketra tunable lighting, including the dimming panel room
• Motorized shade power and control wiring
• Generac standby generator: pad, transfer switch, panel integration, gas coordination
• EV charger circuits, pool and spa equipment, landscape lighting feeds
• Finish: fixtures, keypads, devices, programming, commissioning and the owner walkthrough

Fire sprinkler, HVAC and plumbing are other trades. We coordinate with them daily; we do not pretend to be them.

What builders ask

Inspections

Passing the first time is the schedule.

On a custom home the electrical inspections are the rough, sometimes a service inspection, and the final, and each one that fails costs the builder a week. County Line schedules its own inspections, walks the house before the inspector arrives, and has worked with the inspectors in the City of Los Angeles, Malibu, Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Beverly Hills and the three counties long enough to know what each one looks for. The company keeps the correction list short by doing the work to the code as written, not to the code as remembered.

As-builts and a labeled panel go to the builder at the end, because the next electrician to open that panel, in ten years, should not have to guess.

Change orders

Where they come from, and how County Line keeps them rare.

Most electrical change orders on a custom home come from three places: a lighting plan that does not match the framing, an owner who decides at trim that there should be a keypad by the bed after all, and a service that was sized for the house in the drawings rather than the house being built, with its generator, its two EV chargers and its induction range. County Line prices from the full set to catch the first, captures the owner's decisions in writing before finish to catch the second, and sizes the service from a real load calculation to catch the third.

When a change is genuinely the owner's, it is priced in writing before the work is done. A change order that arrives after the fact is a bill, not a change order.