Arc Flash, Grounding and Electrical Inspections in the Austin Area

Grounding and inspections for builders and owners

Much of this work starts with a missed inspection. From 2019 through 2025, builders and electricians around Austin brought us about 180 Ufer ground jobs, most often when a house reached the city inspection without a record that its grounding had been checked. We trace a tone across the slab steel from the panel ground and measure the electrode with a three-pole fall-of-potential test. In a sample of fifteen reports, most slabs measured about 1 to 8 ohms to remote earth.

When the drywall goes up before the city inspector sees the rough-in wiring, the city asks for an engineer to review the methods and materials. We have done more than a hundred of those reviews since 2020. On each visit we look into the walls with a video borescope through several devices, usually four to seven. Missing cable anchoring near the boxes is the most common finding.

Pool builders, electricians and homeowners have asked us to inspect pool bonding about 55 times since 2018. On a sound installation, continuity from the pool ground to the bonding halo, the shell, the pumps and the panels reads in hundredths of an ohm. The perimeter surface counts out to 3 feet from the inside wall of the pool under NEC^® 680.26(B)(2), so the bonding conductor has to be in that band; on one passing pool it sat 18 to 24 inches from the wall.

Arc flash studies and infrared scans

Some Austin-area sites have more than one utility service. The truss and wall panel plant in Pflugerville runs four buildings, each with its own utility service, in one 231-bus model. The community campus in Austin has three services, two of them added in recent upgrades. A school addition in Dripping Springs came out with nothing above about 6 cal/cm², while the 480 V service at an electronics facility reached about 50, so de-energized work there means coordinating with the utility.

EV charging capacity

Condominium boards and property managers ask how many chargers a building can carry. We answer from the switchboard ratings and a year or more of electric bills, converting monthly energy to average demand and applying a conservative peak factor. Studies at five Austin buildings, three downtown towers and an apartment building in San Marcos ranged from 26 new chargers at the San Marcos building to panel layouts for about 300 in one downtown tower.

Forensic electrical investigations

Dreiym Engineering’s forensic electrical engineers serve clients in Austin from our office and lab in Coldspring, Texas. Our licensed Professional Engineers bring over 30 years of combined experience, and our work runs from electrical failure investigations to expert witness testimony.

Corrosion work nearby

Our corrosion engineers work here too: holiday testing and CP start-up on a new gas line at a semiconductor plant in Austin, a galvanic CP design for a water district storage tank, and a soil corrosivity memo for a new industrial gas plant in Taylor, where the geotechnical borings found mostly clay at pipe depth.