The call always comes about eighteen months late.
The house is gorgeous. Keypads where you want them, cable run neat enough to photograph, an integrator who was pleasant and knew his gear cold. And now the Wi-Fi dies every night around seven, or a dimmer runs warm, or they are selling and the inspector is asking a question nobody in the room can answer, because the outfit that pulled the cable was never on the permit and the electrician who was on the permit never laid eyes on the cable.
I am Alexandr Godonoaga. I own Cob Services LLC, I hold Illinois electrical license #26-00032356, and I am registered with the City of Naperville as an electrical contractor. What follows is an argument, and I will admit up front that I have money riding on it. Read it that way and judge it anyway.
How the job gets split
Almost every Naperville smart home project I walk into is staffed the same way, and nobody ever decided to do it this way. It just happens.
Homeowner hires a GC. GC brings an electrician for the real electrical work: circuits, panel, devices, permit. Then the homeowner, separately, hires an AV company for the fun part. The Cat6. The rack. The cameras, the lighting control, the shades that close when the sun hits the west windows.
Two companies. Two contracts. One stud bay.
That last part is the whole problem, and it sounds too small to matter. It isn’t. The wall does not know where your contracts end. The data cable and the romex go through the same holes, get stapled to the same joists, and sometimes, God help us, get stapled to each other.
What Naperville actually asks for
Now, most suburbs, this would be a workflow gripe. Annoying, not serious. Naperville is different, and it is different in a way that catches out-of-town contractors constantly.
The city requires electrical contractors to register with the City of Naperville before they can work here. Not just hold an Illinois license. Register, with the city, specifically. The same page notes that Naperville runs its own electrical distribution system instead of sitting under ComEd, which is why its service rules are its own, and that the city accepts ICC certifications, Standard Residential Electrician and Standard Master Electrician among them, in place of testing at the municipal level. That last bit is the credential I carry, which is either a coincidence or the reason I keep writing about this.
The permit requirement does not stop at the circuits, either. It reaches into data and security cabling above a certain threshold. I laid out the specifics in our piece on what smart home wiring actually costs in Naperville, so I will not repeat the whole thing here.
Which leaves one question worth asking out loud. Your AV integrator is about to run cable inside Naperville city limits. Is that company registered with the city as an electrical contractor?
In my experience, no. Almost never. Not because they are shady, but because they are an AV company, and AV companies are not electrical contractors. So either the cable is going in outside the permit, or it is quietly getting attributed to an electrician who never looked at it. I would not want to be the homeowner in either version.
Four things I get called to fix
Cable running next to power
Twenty feet of Cat6 stapled alongside romex in the same bay. It looks fine. It passes a walkthrough. It also picks up enough noise to drop packets at random, and I promise you nobody is ever going to diagnose that from the router. The homeowner spends a year yelling at their internet provider. The fix is to re-pull the cable, which means opening drywall that was closed two years ago.
An electrician thinks about induction constantly because it is the thing that bites him. An AV tech was trained on the gear. Different worry, different reflex.
Smart dimmers with nowhere to land a neutral
Most smart dimmers want a neutral at the switch box. A lot of Naperville houses built before the mid-eighties do not have one there. When the automation company hits that wall, the tempting move is a no-neutral dimmer that trickles current through the load to keep itself alive.
Does it work? Sort of. It also makes LED fixtures glow faintly when they are supposedly off, or buzz, or sit warmer than they should, depending on the load. The right answer is to pull a neutral. That is electrician work, on a permit, and it costs money. Which is precisely why it gets skipped when it falls into the crack between two contracts.
Loads nobody added up
The lighting processor sips power. The network rack sips power. If the smart home showed up alone, none of this would matter.
It never shows up alone. It arrives holding hands with the kitchen, the basement buildout, the hot tub, the EV charger. Somebody has to total that. When the electrician’s scope was written before the AV scope existed, nobody does, and the panel finds out the hard way in February.
I run a load calculation before I give you a number, not after. If your panel cannot carry the plan, you hear it from me before you have spent anything. If you want to get ahead of that, we have written about spotting an outdated Naperville panel and about when a subpanel handles it instead of a full upgrade.
The seam
This is the one that actually costs people money.
Something fails. The AV company says it is electrical. The electrician says it is the gear. Both of them believe it. Neither is lying to you. And you are now the general contractor of your own problem, writing checks to two companies so they can point at each other more thoroughly.
One contractor, one permit, nobody to point at. That is the entire argument, and I could have stopped writing four paragraphs ago.
Where the integrator beats me
A post that says the other guy is useless is not worth your time, so let me be straight.
A good integrator will design a better system than I will. Full stop. They know this year’s controllers, they know which platform actually talks to which lock without a hack, they have real opinions about speaker placement that I do not have and am not going to pretend to have. If you want a proper theater, hire one. If you want whole-house audio that sounds like someone tuned it, hire one. They will also program a scene layout that fits how your family moves through the house, which is a craft, and it is not my craft.
My argument is narrower than “hire me instead.” The wiring should sit with the licensed, city-registered electrical contractor who is already carrying the permit and already answerable for the panel. Design and programming stay with the integrator. Those two things have never once had to conflict, and on the projects that go well they don’t: the integrator tells us where the drops go, we pull and terminate them on our permit, they come back and commission it. Everybody does the part they are good at.
How we handle it
We take the structured wiring and the electrical remodel on one permit, as one contractor who is on the hook for all of it. The load calculation happens before the quote. The permit covers the whole scope, high voltage and low, so there is no gap for anything to fall through. Data gets run separately from power with real separation, because that is what keeps a network from failing in ways nobody can trace. Neutrals get pulled where the devices need them rather than worked around. And when there is an integrator on the job, we work with their drop schedule instead of around it.
If the plan needs circuits or a panel that can carry them, that is our panel work and our dedicated circuits. If it is riding along with a bigger renovation, it lives under remodeling and renovation electrical. For what the labor runs, there is our remodeling electrician cost breakdown. And if you have read this far and quietly decided that smart switches on the wiring you already have is plenty, honestly, for a lot of houses it is. Start there.
Four questions, whoever you hire
Ask if they are registered with the City of Naperville as an electrical contractor, and ask them to show you, not tell you. Ask who is pulling the permit for the low-voltage cable, by name, out loud. Ask whether the data runs and the power runs are going to share a bay, and pay attention to whether the answer is specific or vague. Ask whether anyone has run a load calculation, and if the answer is that it will get sorted out later, understand that later means after you have signed.
If your two companies give you two different answers to those, you just found the seam. Better now than in eighteen months.
Frequently asked questions
Can an AV integrator legally run smart home wiring in Naperville?
Naperville requires electrical contractors to register with the city, and its permit requirement extends to low-voltage data and security cabling above a defined threshold. Most AV integrators are not registered electrical contractors, so a registered contractor has to be responsible for the work and the permit.
Should I hire an electrician or an AV company for smart home wiring?
Use both. Keep the wiring with the licensed, city-registered electrician who already carries the permit and answers for the panel, and let the AV integrator do system design, gear selection, and programming, which is what they are genuinely better at.
What goes wrong when the low-voltage and line-voltage work are split between two companies?
Usually one of three things: data cable run alongside power cable, which causes network dropouts nobody can diagnose; smart dimmers installed without a neutral conductor; or new loads added to a panel that was never recalculated. When it fails, neither company owns the seam between the two scopes.
Why does Naperville have different electrical rules than other suburbs?
Naperville operates its own electrical distribution system instead of being served by ComEd, so the utility service rules are the city’s own, and it keeps a separate contractor registration requirement on top of state licensing.
Does Cob Services work with AV integrators?
Yes, and it is the arrangement we prefer. The integrator specifies the drops and the system, we pull and terminate on our permit as the responsible electrical contractor, and they come back to commission it.
Do I need a permit to add smart home wiring to my Naperville house?
In most cases, yes. Naperville requires a permit before electrical work begins, and low-voltage data and security cabling above the city’s threshold is included. The work has to be performed by a state-licensed electrical contractor registered with the City of Naperville.
About the author: Alexandr Godonoaga is the owner of Cob Services LLC, an Illinois licensed electrician (#26-00032356) and ICC-certified installer, registered as an electrical contractor with the City of Naperville. He handles electrical remodeling, panel work, structured wiring, and EV charger installation for homeowners in Naperville, Lisle, Downers Grove, Aurora, Plainfield, and Bolingbrook. Cob Services LLC, 2020 Calamos Ct Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563. (630) 427-5923. Contact us, or read more about the company.