Scruggs Electric has been rewiring the old houses of Seminole Heights since 1992
Dennis Scruggs built a Tampa electrical business on the wiring of old houses, and many of his customers have stayed with him for years.
Tampa, FL
The feeder wire in the meter can had shorted, and it was glowing red hot. It was 8 p.m., and Scruggs Electric was the only company that called back, one customer wrote in a Google review. A crew came out at 10 that night to make the household safe, then returned the next morning to replace the meter can and the wires.
Dennis Scruggs has been taking calls like that in Tampa since 1992, and many of his customers have stayed with him. A Tampa real estate broker has written that Scruggs and his team have done work for at least 40 of his customers over the years. Another agent wrote that the crew has done work at his own home and for his clients for many years.
The company’s office is on North Central Avenue in Seminole Heights, the historic neighborhood it calls home. The work fits the address. Much of it is in old houses, including 1920s bungalows, and in the wiring hidden inside them. “I do a ton of stuff in my own neighborhood, which is Seminole Heights,” he says.
Scruggs incorporated the company at the Central Avenue address in 1995. He remembers how the trade ran back then. “My guys used to carry pagers and have to call me from a pay phone,” he says.
The business has changed shape once. In the late 2000s he took on a partner, and the two ran Powerhouse Electric of Tampa Bay, with Scruggs as president. After about eight years he wanted a new direction. In 2017 he bought out his partner and formed Scruggs Electric II, which works under the Scruggs Electric name today.
The oldest wiring the crew finds is knob-and-tube, wires strung on porcelain knobs, a method in common use in North America from about 1880 into the early 1940s. The company’s services page lays out the trouble with it. There is no ground wire, so it cannot safely take a three-pronged plug. Its rubber and cloth coating needs room to shed heat, and if household insulation is laid over it, the company warns, the wiring becomes a fire waiting to happen.
Houses built between 1965 and 1973 bring a different problem: aluminum wiring. Here the company’s fix is less drastic than many owners fear. The aluminum stays in the walls. The electricians repair the connections at outlets, switches and light fixtures, joining the aluminum to short lengths of copper with AlumiConn connectors. Insurance companies, the company notes, now require those connections to be repaired.
Then there are the panels. Federal Pacific was one of the most common panel makers in North America from the 1950s into the 1980s, and millions of its panels went into homes. The company’s explainer says they can appear to work fine for years, then overheat after a single short circuit. Its photo gallery includes a burned one.
Scruggs Electric says it specializes in the repairs that four-point insurance inspections turn up. Some fixes come in stages. One family wrote that their breaker panels were maxed out, and that the crew had come a handful of times with short-term fixes while they geared up for the long-term one.
Scruggs does not do it alone. The company’s website lists electricians, an apprentice, a project manager and an operations manager. One customer wrote that a staff member named Michael talked her through a breaker problem over the phone after a power surge, so she never needed a service call. The photo gallery mixes jobs with crew boat days and company parties. The caption on a 2018 party picture says that when it is more than your job, it is your family.
Not every job is a house. The crew installed LED lights at The Wine Bar Cafe on North Florida Avenue to show off its murals. It has put in a commercial diesel generator. The broker who counted 40 customers also hired the crew to handle wiring problems when he renovated his real estate office.
Scruggs will drive for work, within reason. “I travel all of Tampa,” he says. “I go across the bridge to Pinellas. I go to Lakeland and Plant City. I go to Riverview.” He puts the outer edge at about 50 miles but is practical about it. “I don’t mind driving 20, 25 minutes,” he says. “But if it gets too far out of the range for a service call, it’s kind of not practical.”
He has thought about how big the company should be, and his answer is close to its current size. “I’m pretty good where I’m at right now,” he says. He might add another truck, but growing, he says, would mostly mean finding the right people. Work is not the constraint. “I’ve been around so long, I have quite an impressive database of customers,” he says. “We stay really busy, and at times I can’t keep up with it.”