Guides
August 28, 2026
Not every electrician who offers EV charger installation is qualified to do it safely. Here's how to spot the ones who aren't.
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You already own the car. You already know Level 1 charging — plugging into a standard wall outlet — isn’t going to cut it for daily life. What you need now is a proper Level 2 home charger installed by someone who actually knows what they’re doing. The problem is that EV charger installation has attracted a wave of under-qualified contractors who look legitimate until something goes wrong. This guide is for Tarrant County homeowners who are in the process of vetting contractors and want to know what separates a real professional from someone who’s going to create a bigger problem than they solve.
Most people spend a lot of time picking the right EV charger. They compare brands, read reviews, watch YouTube videos. Then they spend about ten minutes picking the person who installs it. That’s backwards.
The charger is just hardware. The installation is what determines whether it works reliably, whether it’s safe, and whether it holds up when your insurance company or a home inspector starts asking questions.
A proper Level 2 home charging setup requires a dedicated 240V circuit, correct wire gauge for the amperage load, a panel that can support continuous high-draw charging, and in virtually every Tarrant County municipality, a permit. When any one of those elements is wrong, you don’t always know it immediately. You find out later — when a breaker keeps tripping, when a home sale falls through, or when your insurer asks who did the work.
In Texas, anyone performing electrical work for compensation must hold an active Texas Electrical Contractor License — a TECL — issued by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. This isn’t a technicality. It’s the law, and it exists because electrical work done incorrectly kills people and burns houses down.
The red flag isn’t just that a contractor is unlicensed. It’s that an unlicensed contractor often doesn’t tell you they’re unlicensed. They show up with tools, they sound confident, and they give you a price that seems reasonable.
The way you protect yourself is simple: ask for the TECL number and verify it yourself at tdlr.texas.gov. The lookup takes less than five minutes and costs nothing.
We hold Texas Electrical Contractor License TECL 25420. That number is public, it’s verifiable, and we’ll give it to you without hesitation. If a contractor hedges when you ask for theirs — changes the subject, says they’re “registered” instead of licensed, or tells you it isn’t necessary for this type of job — that’s your answer. Walk away.
The EV charger installation market has attracted a specific category of unqualified operators: handymen who’ve done a few installs and feel confident, EV equipment vendors who bundle installation with the hardware sale, and general contractors who perform electrical work outside their license scope. None of them are legally permitted to pull a permit in Texas. Which brings us to the next red flag.
Permits are required for 240V circuit installations in virtually every city and municipality across Tarrant County. Fort Worth, Keller, North Richland Hills, Hurst, Euless, Bedford — the requirement is consistent across the board.
A licensed electrical contractor pulls the permit, schedules the inspection, and makes sure the work is signed off by the local authority having jurisdiction. That’s the process. It’s not optional, and it’s not something you can skip to save time.
Here’s why this matters beyond just following the rules. If unpermitted electrical work is discovered during a home inspection — which it routinely is, because inspectors know what to look for — you’re looking at delays, required remediation, and potentially a failed sale. If a fire or electrical fault occurs and your insurer discovers the work was done without a permit by an unlicensed contractor, your coverage may be voided entirely. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s a documented outcome that catches homeowners completely off guard.
A contractor who tells you a permit isn’t needed for “just an outlet” either doesn’t know the code or is hoping you don’t. Neither is acceptable.
We pull permits on every EV charger installation we do — it’s not an upsell, it’s not optional, and it’s not something we charge extra for as a line item surprise. It’s part of doing the job correctly. If the contractor you’re talking to hasn’t mentioned permits at all, ask directly. Their answer will tell you a lot.
It’s also worth noting that unpermitted work doesn’t just affect you at resale. Tarrant County has seen significant growth in EV adoption, with registrations projected to exceed 30,000 by 2026. As more homeowners install chargers, inspectors and insurers are becoming more familiar with what compliant installations look like — and more likely to flag the ones that aren’t.
The license and permit issues are the most consequential red flags, but they’re not the only ones. The next three are subtler — and in some ways more common, because they show up even with contractors who are technically licensed but still cutting corners on the work itself.
Understanding these signals doesn’t require any electrical knowledge. It just requires paying attention to how a contractor communicates before the job starts. The way they handle the quoting and assessment process tells you almost everything you need to know about how they’ll handle the installation.
A qualified EV charging contractor doesn’t just show up and start running wire. Before any installation, a legitimate electrician assesses your electrical panel — total service size, available breaker spaces, signs of wear or overheating, and whether the panel can safely support a continuous high-draw load like Level 2 charging. This is called a load calculation, and skipping it is one of the most common mistakes made by under-qualified installers.
Here’s why it matters specifically in Tarrant County: roughly 35 to 45 percent of homes in the Dallas and Tarrant County areas were built before 1980. A significant portion of the housing stock in older neighborhoods across Fort Worth, North Richland Hills, Hurst, and Bedford still operates on 100-amp service — panels that weren’t designed to handle the sustained electrical load of daily EV charging.
If a contractor doesn’t assess your panel before quoting you, they either don’t know what they’re looking at or they’re hoping to avoid a conversation about a panel upgrade that would complicate their bid.
A contractor who gives you a number over the phone — or worse, on-site without putting anything in writing — is leaving themselves room to change that number later. Always get a written quote. It should specify the scope of work, the materials being used, and what’s included.
If a contractor resists putting it in writing, that’s not a personality quirk. It’s a pattern.
We provide transparent, upfront written pricing with no hidden fees on every job we quote — because a homeowner who doesn’t know what they agreed to isn’t a satisfied customer, they’re a dispute waiting to happen.
The combination of a skipped panel assessment and a verbal-only quote is particularly common with low-bid contractors. The price looks attractive right up until the job is underway and the real scope becomes apparent. At that point, you’re already committed, and the leverage has shifted.
This one sounds obvious, but it’s easy to overlook when someone seems personable and confident. A contractor’s reputation should be verifiable through multiple independent sources — not just their own website or a handful of reviews they’ve curated.
Check their BBB profile and look specifically at the complaint history, not just the letter rating. Check Google and Yelp for review volume and recency. Ask whether they’ve received any named industry recognition, like Angie’s List Super Service Awards, which are performance-based and not self-reported.
The absence of complaints matters as much as the presence of positive reviews. In a trade where things occasionally go wrong — where jobs are more complex than they appeared upfront, where customers are stressed and under pressure — a contractor who has maintained a clean complaint record over years of operation is demonstrating something real about how they handle problems.
We’ve been serving DFW families since the late 1990s. We hold an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau with zero customer complaints on record. We’ve earned multiple Super Service Awards from Angie’s List. And we’re second-generation electricians — this isn’t a business we started because EV charger installation was trending. We know Tarrant County’s housing stock, we know the neighborhoods that were built in the 1980s with panels that need attention, and we know what it takes to do this work correctly the first time.
A contractor who can’t point you to a verifiable track record — or who deflects when you ask for references, a license number, or a BBB profile — is asking you to take their word for something you shouldn’t have to take on faith. The whole point of hiring a licensed, experienced professional is that you don’t have to wonder. You can check.
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