Every Lagos home needs a small army of artisans: an electrician, a plumber, a generator mechanic, an air-conditioning technician, a carpenter, a painter, and increasingly someone who understands inverters and solar. Good ones are worth keeping for life. Finding them is mostly a matter of asking.
Finding one
- Ask your neighbours, your caretaker and your estate. The best artisans in Lagos work by reputation, street by street.
- Ask to see work they have done, and the person they did it for.
- Use the same people again. An artisan who knows your house, and knows you will call them again, does better work.
Agree the job before it starts
- Describe the job, and get a price for it - labour, separately from materials - before any work begins.
- Expect to pay part up front, usually called mobilisation, and the rest when the work is done and tested. Do not pay everything in advance.
- Get a written note of what was agreed, even a text message.
Buy the materials yourself
The commonest trick is not bad work but bad materials: a cheaper cable, pipe or part fitted in place of the one you paid for, with a receipt for the dear one. Where you can:
- Buy materials yourself, from a reputable shop, or go with the artisan.
- Keep the old part when something is replaced, so you can see it was.
- Check the packaging of anything electrical. Counterfeit cables, sockets and breakers are common, and they are what start fires.
Electrical work: the things that matter
Power in Lagos switches between the grid, a generator and often an inverter, and the connections between them are where accidents happen.
- Insist on a proper changeover switch between the grid and the generator. A generator wired straight into the house can feed power back into the street’s lines and kill someone working on them.
- Insist on earthing, and on a working breaker for each circuit.
- Run the generator outdoors, well away from windows and doors. Generator fumes kill people in their sleep in Lagos every year.
Supervise, and test
Be there, or have someone there, while work is done. Test everything before you pay the balance: run the taps, switch on every socket, run the AC for an hour.
In a rented home
Check the tenancy agreement for who pays for what. Structural repairs are usually the landlord’s; many landlords expect tenants to handle small ones. Agree it in writing before you call anyone.