Apartments, storefronts, gyms and restaurants, wired by one licensed electrician. Chris answers, and you know the price first.

Replaced. The National Electrical Code says the inside parts of electrical equipment, the bus bars, the terminals and the other surfaces, must not be contaminated by paint or plaster, and scraping or solvent is not an approved fix. Even a light coat of paint can stop a breaker making a solid connection to the bus bar, and that is where overheating and arcing start. That is why the Lindenwold job is new breakers in every unit rather than cleaning up the old ones.

It needs a permit. New Jersey's list of ordinary maintenance, the work that needs none, covers replacing a receptacle, a switch or a light fixture with a like one, and breakers are not on it. So a breaker replacement goes through the municipal construction office like other electrical work, and across a building's worth of units that is worth planning for at the start rather than finding out about halfway.

Yes. The National Electrical Code asks for every circuit to carry a legible and permanent description of what it feeds, specific enough to tell it apart from every other circuit, and it cannot depend on something that changes, like who is living in which bedroom. On a production job every panel gets labelled the same way, so whoever opens the next one can read it.

The state's maintenance rules for multiple dwellings say the electrical service has to be kept in good operational condition and the existing wiring and equipment kept in good repair. Breakers have to be there, and none can be rated above what the wiring it protects can carry. Heating equipment that runs on electricity needs a circuit of its own, and every kitchen needs at least two duplex outlets. If the load in a building is more than the service can carry, the load comes down or the service goes up.