ESA inspection

What it is checking

The permitted work, against the code. Not the whole house, and not the condition of wiring that was already there — the scope is what the permit covered.

That boundary is worth knowing, because people sometimes expect an ESA inspection on a panel replacement to constitute an assessment of the property. It does not, and it was never meant to.

Who arranges it

The licensed contractor who filed the permit. You should not be calling ESA yourself, and if a contractor asks you to pull the permit, that is a signal worth pausing on — it usually means they are not licensed to.

The certificate

A passed inspection produces a Certificate of Inspection, which is the document that matters when you sell, when an insurer asks, or when a lender wants evidence the work was done properly.

Only ESA issues it. No electrician, however qualified, can produce one, and any assessment you buy from a contractor — including ours — is findings and photographs rather than a certificate.

How it differs from an electrical inspection

An ESA inspection is triggered by work and looks at that work. A contractor's electrical inspection is triggered by you wanting to know, and looks at the system you already have. One ends in a legal document; the other ends in a prioritised list of what is wrong and what it costs.

They answer different questions, and the answer to "my insurer asked for something" depends entirely on which one they meant.