What to Ask a Low Voltage Contractor Before You Sign

The contract questions that come after the vetting questions#

Vetting a low voltage contractor and contracting with one are two different exercises. Vetting asks whether the company is licensed, insured, solvent and experienced, and the contractor selection guide covers that ground. This page starts one step later, at the point where a contractor has been selected and a subcontract or purchase order is about to be signed.

At that point the risk is no longer the company. It is the document. Almost every dispute on a Division 27 or Division 28 scope traces back to one of three things: a boundary that two trades each assumed the other one owned, a deliverable nobody defined, or a schedule assumption nobody wrote down. All three are cheap to resolve before signature and expensive afterward, because after signature the resolution is a change order priced without competition.

The questions below are neutral. Telelink Business Services is a licensed C-7 Low Voltage Systems Contractor, CSLB License #472017. These questions test a bid from Telelink exactly the way they test a bid from anyone else. Ask them in writing and attach the answers to the contract. A contractor who has done this work will answer each one with specifics. A contractor who has not will answer with general assurances, which is itself useful information.

Scope gap questions: who provides what at each boundary#

Low voltage work sits between other trades on almost every side. The cable needs a pathway somebody else is building, terminates on a backboard the carpenter hangs, feeds a rack that needs a circuit and a bond from a C-10 electrician, and runs a door that gets its lock from the hardware supplier. Each of those is a boundary, and a bid can be made to look competitive by quietly assuming the other side of every one. Ask the contractor to answer this table row by row, in writing, before signature.

Boundary question	Trade that usually picks it up	Where it goes wrong
Who provides conduit, sleeves, J-hooks and cable tray?	Division 26 or Division 27, whichever the specification names	Neither section names it, so both bidders exclude the pathway
Who core drills floors and rated walls, and who patches?	General contractor or the electrical contractor	Priced as concrete work by nobody, found at the first riser penetration
Who firestops the rated penetrations, and to which listed system?	Commonly Division 27 for its own penetrations, sometimes Division 07	Cable crosses a rated assembly with no listed system named
Who provides the plywood backboard and the room finish?	General contractor, usually under Division 06	The room is handed over with bare studs the week the racks land
Who provides dedicated circuits and receptacles at the racks?	Division 26 electrical, a C-10 scope	The load and location never reach the electrician before rough-in closes
Who bonds the telecom room to building ground?	Division 26 runs the bonding conductor to the busbar; Division 27 provides the busbar, backbone and rack bonding	Split down the middle, and both halves get excluded
Who furnishes and installs electrified locks, strikes and maglocks?	Division 08 door hardware supplier, installed by the hardware installer or a C-28 contractor	A spec that says “provide a complete access control system” with no door matrix
Who provides door position switches and request-to-exit devices?	Division 28 in most specifications, sometimes prepped into the hardware	Counted twice or not at all, depending on which document was read
Who provides network switches, controllers, licenses and IP addresses?	Owner, the owner’s IT integrator, or Division 27	The bidder assumed owner furnished; the owner assumed the reverse
Who provides racks, cabinets, ladder rack, PDUs and grounding kits?	Division 27	Buried in an equipment room fittings section nobody read
Who removes abandoned cable above the ceiling?	Division 27 when it is in the contract, and nobody when it is not	The accessible portion has to come out and the labor is never trivial
Who provides lifts, ceiling access, escorts and after hours building access?	General contractor or the owner	The crew arrives, cannot reach the ceiling, and bills the hours anyway

Two rows move more money than the rest combined. The first is the door. Access control disputes come down to the strike, and the fix is a door by door matrix listing every device at every opening and the section that furnishes it. The second is abandoned cable. Removal is labor with no material value attached, so it is the easiest line to leave out of a number. If the ceiling is full, put it in the contract with a quantity or a unit price. Our cable removal and decommissioning page describes how that scope gets surveyed and priced.

Two more boundaries are legal rather than commercial. Fire alarm falls outside the C-7 classification, and intrusion alarm sales and monitoring require a separate license from the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. If either appears in a low voltage bid under a C-7 license alone, ask which contractor actually holds it. The Division 27 and 28 specification checklist sets out where those lines fall in the specification itself.

Labor: who is actually going to be on site#

Ask three questions and get three plain answers.

Are the technicians who will perform this work your employees? If some are not, name the entity, its license classification and number, and its insurance. Subcontracted labor is legal and often necessary at peak staffing. What matters is that it is disclosed before signature rather than discovered at rough-in.

Who supervises on site, and are they on this job full time or splitting across several? A foreman covering four jobs is normal, but it changes how fast a discovered condition turns into a decision.

Who signs the test results and the warranty? That should be the entity you are contracting with. If another company runs the tests and the certificate carries your contractor’s logo anyway, ask who you call when a link fails in month eight.

On prevailing wage work there is a fourth question. Confirm the Department of Industrial Relations registration number for every entity that will furnish labor, not just the prime subcontractor, and confirm who files certified payroll for each.

Testing and closeout: what gets delivered and in what format#

“We test everything” is not a specification. Get the following into the contract.

The test standard and the limit line. For copper, permanent link or channel certification to ANSI/TIA-568.2-E at the category installed. For fiber, Tier 1 optical loss testing at minimum, with Tier 2 OTDR traces where the owner wants a record of what is inside the link. State which one, because Tier 2 is a real cost and should not be a surprise in either direction.

The tester and its calibration. Name the field tester accuracy level required for the category being installed and require the calibration date to appear in the results. A tester out of calibration produces numbers that cannot be defended later.

The delivery format. This is where most closeout packages fail. Require the native tester database, one record per link, plus a PDF exported from it. A summary sheet listing “all links pass” is not test data, and neither is a scanned printout.

The labeling scheme, submitted for approval before any label is printed, and required to match the drawings and the test record identifiers exactly.

The as-built package: record drawings showing every outlet and pathway as installed, rack elevations as built, the bonding diagram, firestop photographs with the listed system number, device schedules, configuration exports and administrator credentials. The closeout documentation checklist lists each item and who uses it.

Ask one question directly: will administrator credentials for cameras, access control, intercom and the phone system be turned over to the owner at closeout? The answer should be yes without conditions. Our cabling testing and audits page covers what certification results look like when they arrive.

Schedule: how many site visits does the price assume#

Low voltage work is not continuous. A crew mobilizes for rough-in, leaves while walls close and ceilings go in, returns to trim out, returns again to terminate and test, and returns for cutover and training. Every one is a mobilization, and every unplanned extra one is a cost somebody absorbs.

Ask how many mobilizations the price assumes and what milestone triggers each. Ask what happens if the schedule slips and the crew is sent home. Ask whether the price assumes normal hours, and if any of it is priced at overtime, which portion.

In an occupied building, add three more. What notice do occupants need and who issues it. What is the maximum outage window per system and per area. What is the cutover sequence if the existing system has to stay live until the new one is proven. Those answers belong in the contract, not in a preconstruction meeting.

Change orders, warranty and life after turnover#

Fix the change order mechanism before you need it. A workable subcontract states unit prices for repeatable work such as a cabling drop, a camera or a card reader, hourly rates by labor class, a stated markup on material and on subcontracted work, who may approve a change, and what documentation must exist before work proceeds. Setting those terms while you still have leverage is the point of asking now.

On warranty, separate the two documents. The contractor warrants workmanship, commonly one year on commercial work, covering terminations, routing, support, labeling and conformance to the specification. The manufacturer warrants components and application performance, commonly 20 to 25 years on a cabling system, and only where the installer is enrolled in that program and used an approved end to end channel. If the specification requires the extended warranty, confirm who submits the registration, because it happens after installation and it is easy to forget.

Then ask what happens the day after turnover. Who is the service contact and at what number. What is a warranty call and what is billable. Whether a service agreement exists and what it covers. Knowing the answer before signature is better than finding it during an outage.

Red flag answers and good answers#

Question	Red flag answer	Good answer
What is excluded from your price?	“Nothing, it is a complete system.”	A written exclusion list by specification section, naming the trade that carries each item
Who firestops the penetrations?	“That is normally handled by the GC.”	“We firestop our own penetrations to a listed system and the system numbers are in the closeout.”
Who provides the door hardware?	“It is all part of access control.”	“Strikes, maglocks and panic hardware are Division 08. Here is our device count at each opening.”
Are the technicians your employees?	“They are all our guys.”	“Yes, all employees,” or a named subcontractor with a license number and certificate of insurance
How do you test?	“Everything gets tested and certified.”	The standard, the limit line, the tester accuracy level, the calibration requirement and the delivery format
What do we get at closeout?	“A full closeout package.”	An itemized list matching the specification, with the file formats named
How many mobilizations are in the price?	“As many as it takes.”	A number tied to milestones, with the cost of an additional mobilization stated
How are change orders priced?	“We will work it out, we are fair.”	A unit price schedule, hourly rates by class, a stated markup and a named approver
What is the warranty?	“Twenty five years.”	One year on labor, plus the named manufacturer system warranty with the registration path described
Who holds the admin credentials?	“We keep them so we can support you.”	“The owner receives full administrator credentials at closeout.”

None of the red flag answers proves a bad contractor. Each one shows the question has not been priced yet, which is why it should be asked while the contract is still open.

Next step#

If you are about to sign a Division 27 or Division 28 subcontract in California, run the boundary table above against the scope letter you were given and see how many rows it answers. Send the drawings and the specification through request a bid for a scope letter that answers all twelve, or review the submittal and handoff process on the for general contractors page first.