Electrical is two businesses on one phone line, and one of them is in the dark
An electrical shop does its paperwork after dark. The day goes on panels, attics and crawlspaces, so the evening is the voicemails you could not take, the permit applications and inspection dates to chase, the panel estimates you promised on Tuesday, and last week’s service-call invoices, written up at the kitchen table. One call is missing from that pile: the woman whose kitchen went dark at 6:40 left no message. She rang down the list until an electrician answered, and by the time you sit down she has one.
The other kind of call has been coming for years. The panel is a crowded box with no spaces left, the car charger is already on order, and she wants to know whether that is two thousand dollars or twelve before she gives up a morning for an estimate. A dark kitchen and a crowded panel are different customers, and one form serves neither of them. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the panel job asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the service call carries your trip and diagnostic charge inside the number instead of springing it at the door, and a rewire or a standby generator goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The panel flow also asks whether she has a photo of the panel with its door open and of the meter outside. The lead flags it, so you know to ask for those pictures when you ring back; carrying the picture itself on the lead is on the roadmap, so it is not a tick in that list.
Every hour of this job is an hour you cannot answer the phone.
Not answering is not rudeness in this trade, it is procedure. Your hands are on conductors you have just proved dead, or you are on your back in a crawlspace, or the main is open and the meter is pulled — none of those is a position you take a call from, and the apprentice cannot take it either, because he is holding the other end of it. Then a line comes down overnight and the morning after is not one call, it is nine, all inside the same twenty minutes, and every one of them is ringing other electricians as well.
| What a missed electrical call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A 200-amp service upgrade, two new circuits and an EV charger | $4,798 – $5,632 |
| A breaker that keeps tripping, one device, next opening | $231 – $293 |
| The same call, wanted same-day, with half the house dark | $300 – $381 |
| One recovered panel job pays for | 24 months of the bundle |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ answers the call you could not take with a text, the first text she gets from you names your shop, and her reply lands on the thread that already holds her panel quote. The message is picked by the hour and the day — the demo shop’s phone runs 7am to 5pm, so a call that arrives after the vans are back gets the after-hours version instead of one that says you are out on a job — and every version asks the question that sorts your morning: is anything hot, buzzing or burning? Four things are already true when you read the list at six the next morning:
Nine calls after a storm, in the order they came
Each missed call you log goes into one list with the minute on it: who rang, from what number, and what was written back. After a line comes down you work the morning from that list, top to bottom, instead of from a phone that shows nine names and no times.
Why the eleven o’clock caller heard nothing
A reply a rule stopped is kept as blocked, with its reason in plain words: quiet hours where she is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. You know exactly why a reply did not go, and who to ring first.
The panel quote and the outage call, together
Both carry her phone number, so the panel questions she answered on your website at nine last night and the call she made at ten past six this morning open as one conversation on one screen.
A count without your test calls in it
Each send is tagged with where it came from, and the dashboard leaves out the ones you sent to yourself while you set it up, so the number you read is homeowners calling an electrician.
Where the texting stands, plainly. There is no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today: you log the outage call, and the reply is written, checked against every rule and held in your outbox where you can read it. The rest already runs: your five messages, the hours you keep on each day, the weekend, holiday and vacation rules, the quiet hours, the opt-outs, and the thread her reply will land on beside her quote. Two rules never bend. A text goes to a caller only between 8am and 9pm where she is, read off her area code, so the call that came in at eleven during the storm is recorded as blocked with the reason, not saved up, and nothing tries it again at eight. And a reply held for more than an hour is retired, never delivered, when sending switches on, because a “sorry we missed your call” about last week’s outage helps nobody. The code that takes a forwarded call and texts the caller back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks; what it lacks is a phone number to answer on, which is paperwork, not software.
You can check every word of that. Put the example electrical shop’s clock on a late evening and watch the same rules record the call as blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open the example account’s own dashboard, no signup, click CallMitt in the left menu, and read the shop’s five messages and the hours it keeps.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersThe eight things that set an electrical number
What is happening at the panel
Nothing, a subpanel, a straight replacement at the same service size, a 200-amp upgrade with meter base and mast, or 400-amp service. Each option carries its own dollars — $0, $1,450, $2,200, $3,400 and $6,900 on the demo — and the one she picks is added once for the job. A pick-one never multiplies, so a subpanel stays one flat amount however many circuits come after it.
New circuit count
The one genuinely per-unit line on this service — your per-circuit rate multiplied by however many you are running, $285 each on the demo. A zero charges nothing on this line at all: no rate, no flat amount, no percentage. That is the behaviour you want when the panel already has the spaces and she is only asking about the panel.
Age of the branch wiring
Knob and tube or cloth-wrapped, 1950s to 1960s, 1970s to 1990s, or 2000s and newer. This is a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because old wire changes the devices, the boxes, the labour and the inspection together. Zero, 6, 14 and 22 percent on the demo — set the ones your own inspector makes you earn.
Aluminum branch wiring
A yes here adds no fee; it lifts the job minimum. Every device in the house gets pigtailed with approved connectors, so on the demo a yes means the quote never comes back under $3,800. The arithmetic stays as it was, and the floor under the finished number moves.
Generator interlock and inlet
A yes adds your own flat amount once for the job, $1,150 on the demo. It is the cheapest standby answer there is and many callers do not know it exists, which makes it a question worth asking on the form rather than in the driveway after the next outage.
A panel in a finished wall
Flush-mounted in drywall, or in a closet with nowhere to stand, means cutting, fishing and patching. That is labour rather than parts, so it belongs on a percentage — 14 percent on the demo — and it is the single most common reason an electrical quote gets revised standing in front of the thing.
What the house is being asked to carry
Capacity, not calendar. A Level 2 EV charger, a heat pump replacing a furnace, a range or dryer circuit, a hot tub — each one a pick-one carrying its own flat amount, $640, $950, $1,150 and $1,250 on the demo. This is the question that turns "the panel is full" into a number, and it is a dropdown rather than a guess.
Travel zone
Your service area as ZIP zones, whole ZIPs or three-digit prefixes, each with a flat trip charge, a percentage or both, and the most specific match to the ZIP she types wins. Mark the ZIPs past your last town as outside your area: she is told politely that it cannot be priced online, and you still get her details. The job minimum does the rest, so one added circuit 40 minutes out still pays for the van.
A real panel flow, start to finish
Eight questions she can answer from the hallway with the panel door open. They run in this order on our electrical demo account, and the total at the bottom is what the live engine returns for these answers; nobody typed it into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she picks | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What are we doing at the panel? | Full service upgrade to 200 amps: panel, meter base and mast | A flat $3,400 for the job — panel, meter base and mast together |
| 2 | How many new circuits are we running? | Two | 2 × the per-circuit rate — $285 each on the demo, so $570 |
| 3 | What is the biggest new thing the house has to carry? | A Level 2 EV charger | A flat $950, once for the job |
| 4 | How old is the wiring we are tying into? | 1970s to 1990s | A percent on the whole job: +6% |
| 5 | Did an insurance inspection flag aluminum branch wiring? | No | Nothing — the rule only fires on yes |
| 6 | Do you want a generator interlock and inlet? | No | Nothing — the rule only fires on yes |
| 7 | Is the panel in a finished wall or a tight space? | No | No tight-space percent on this one |
| 8 | Got a photo of the panel with the door open, and the meter outside? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $3,400 + $570 + $950 = $4,920, then the one percentage answer applies once to all of it: +6% → $5,215.20 | ||
| She sees | $4,798 – $5,632 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all eight answers, and the photo flag | ||
The per-circuit rate, the panel options and the percentages above are the demo account’s, not a Tailgate Office™ price list: you set each one in the dashboard, and a new per-circuit rate never means touching your website. The total is real, though. $4,798 to $5,632 is what the engine returns for those eight answers, and the demo gives you the same in about a minute.
Rather see it than read it? Our example electrical contractor’s website carries NapkinPrice, the same engine quoting live on a site that is not ours. Give it the eight answers in the table and the same range comes back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)Three services, and only two of them ever show a price
A panel upgrade, a tripping breaker and a whole-house rewire are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a rewire like a dead outlet.
Panel, service and circuit work — quotes instantly
No trip charge on this one: the visit sells the panel. It carries a job minimum instead, so a single added circuit never comes back under it — $1,800 on the demo, and the low end of the band is that floor rather than 8% below it. One question raises the floor on its own: answer yes to aluminum branch wiring and the minimum goes to $3,800, which is a floor and not a fee. The arithmetic is unchanged; the bottom of the range goes flat instead — the same job that quotes $2,145 to $2,519 with a no comes back $3,800 to $4,104 with a yes. Past a ceiling of $13,800 on the demo it stops pricing and hands you the lead, because a number that size should not be published off eight answers.
Troubleshooting and repair call — quotes instantly
The trip and diagnostic charge lives in the service base fee, so it is added once however many dead outlets you end up chasing and cannot be dodged by answering nothing to everything. On the demo it is $119, already inside the range she sees, so it never turns up for the first time at her door. A breaker that keeps tripping, one device, next opening quotes at $231 to $293. There is a job floor underneath and a ceiling above at $1,600, because past a certain number the honest answer is panel work rather than another hour of chasing a fault.
Rewires, generators and commercial — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the right answer for a house that still has cloth-wrapped wire in the walls, a standby generator with a transfer switch, or three-phase service in a building that has to stay live while you work. The service still asks the building type, how many panels, what the service is today and whether it can be shut down — that last one moves no money, it just tells you whether this is a weekend. Her screen tells her plainly that a job like this is seen first, with no number on it; your lead carries the building, the panels and the service, which is enough to decide how to bid.
Neither priced service can go live without a real base fee or a real minimum, and that is on purpose: a service with neither could show a homeowner $0, and one wrong number on your website costs more than a day spent setting it up properly.
An electrician is hired or lost on the ticket
The panel and service work this page quotes is work you send a licensed electrician to, so the demo job asks about a current license right after age, and that one answer decides who you stop giving an afternoon to.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van doors and the yard sign at every service change. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, does he hold a current electrical license in your state, has he changed out a service panel and re-landed the circuits, how many years has he done electrical work, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three answers end it on the spot (under 18, no current licence, or living past the distance you set), and the other four come back as a weighted fit score.
Two settings on the demo job are worth copying. Miles are a knockout, never a weight: a number answer scores higher as it grows, so weighting distance would put the electrician who lives furthest away at the top of your list. And the last-job question carries no weight, because any answer at all scores full marks, so weighting it would lift every applicant who typed a word. All seven questions on the demo job carry a Spanish translation as well.
Until your texting number is live, an applicant answers those seven questions on your screening page instead of by text: the same questions, knockouts, scoring and pool. The keyword on the van starts working the day your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
An electrician is remembered for exactly as long as the lights are off
The inspector signs off, the meter goes back in, and that evening every light in the house comes on at once and nothing trips. That is the day she would write you a review, and it is the last day she will think about the panel at all. By the weekend it is the box in the garage beside the car charger, and the electrician who spent two days on it has been forgotten the way good electrical work is always forgotten: nothing hums, nothing flickers, nothing to remember. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, the day the inspection passes.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered panel job covers 24 months
That is one panel job, on the demo’s rates. Every service call you would have missed in between comes on top of it.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back and text-to-apply hiring (texts go out once texting is switched on), and, once switched on, a review request after every job, plus customers, jobs, estimates and invoices in one place. 30 days free, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.
Start Free TrialOnly need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.
Electrical questions we get asked
No. The number on your van keeps ringing your phone exactly as it does now, and nothing is ported. The design is that you dial a forwarding code once, from the setup guide, and a call you have not picked up in about twenty seconds goes on to your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business. In place of your voicemail the caller hears a short greeting saying a text is on its way, and the text comes from that texting number, so she dials one number and hears back from another. A call you answer, on your cell or on a second phone in the van, never forwards, so nothing fires. If an answering service takes your nights, point the forwarding at the service for those hours and at the texting number for the rest: an unanswered call can go to one place at a time, and a second code switches the forwarding off. Until your texting number is live, you log the missed call yourself, CallMitt picks the message for that hour and day and checks your hours, the quiet hours, your opt-outs and your suppression list, and the reply is held in your outbox for you to read. The code that will take a forwarded call and do all of that on its own is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks; it waits on a phone number, not on more code.
Once texting is switched on for your account, each caller you miss between 8am and 9pm where she is gets the message you wrote for that hour and day, unless she has opted out or you have suppressed her number, one reply per number per hour however often she redials, and the first text she gets from you names your shop. A call outside those hours is recorded as blocked with the reason, and nothing tries her again in the morning. All forty sit in your call list in the order they rang, so you work it from the top. Until texting is switched on, a reply is written for each call you log and held in your outbox for you to read, and one held more than an hour is never sent, so those callers get a call back from you instead.
No. It stops and hands you the lead. Every instant service has a ceiling, and the demo panel service sets it at $13,800; that job’s midpoint on the demo is $14,115.40, so it goes past it: she sees a plain note that the job is bigger than can be priced online, with your disclaimer and no number. The ceiling is checked against the midpoint before any range is drawn, so it is a decision about the size of the job, not about the top of a band. Put yours where you would stop quoting a panel over the phone.
No, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A seasonal rate in this engine is a date range that repeats every year forever, so encoding a storm premium would charge it on every quiet day of every summer and nothing at all for the February ice storm that actually buries you. There is no weather input, no event flag, and no way to switch a rate on for one week. What a storm changes is volume, not price — which is why the answer to a storm on this page is the phone rather than the rate card. The lever that does exist is a question on the form: how soon do you need us, with today priced above the next opening. That one is honest, it is yours to set, and it is on the demo.
A range, yes, and only a range. The widget shows a bracket and the disclaimer under it says the final number comes after somebody opens the panel, looks at the service entrance and the grounding, and finds out what the utility wants. Write that in your own words: permit and inspection in, drywall patching out, anything the inspector adds priced on the day. A homeowner who gets an honest bracket at nine at night stops calling down the list — and the person whose budget was never going to reach a service change finds that out on your website rather than on your morning, which is a kindness to both of you.
No. The widget never gives a binding quote: every estimate is labelled as a range pending confirmation, and the terms are on her screen before she submits and are saved with the lead. You confirm the real figure once the panel door is open and you have seen the service entrance, as you do now. What the range does change is who rings you: the homeowner whose budget stops well short of a service change finds that out on your website, not after you have driven over.
It suits you better. A message picked by the hour and the day can tell the truth: the after-hours version says when you actually start, and asks whether anything is hot, buzzing or burning, so the genuine emergency identifies itself and everything else waits until the morning instead of going somewhere else. A homeowner who cannot tell when you open assumes you never will; one who gets a straight answer at half past nine at night will usually wait until seven.
About fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and the hours you keep each day; a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page; and about an hour for the eight panel questions, with your per-circuit rate, your panel options, your wiring-age percentages and your travel zones. A priced service will not go live until it carries a real base fee or a real minimum, on purpose. There is no onboarding call, no setup fee and no contract, and $199 a month buys all four tools.
Also run low-voltage, or wire for a builder? The other trade pages are here, the compliance page sets out the texting rules, and you can ask us anything else.
Answer the 6:40 outage. Quote the panel she has put off for years.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.