Credentials: Inspection Competence

Safer Greenbelt's Principal is qualified to inspect, and has long been certified as an electrical inspector
(certifications listed here).
He consults to inspectors, and taught inspectors for decades. Here are further details:

There's a category of official inspector that many homeowners don't know about. You need some background to understand it.

The Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ), normally your city or county, requires a permit for new electrical work, and for much replacement work. Except in one special case the AHJ insists on inspecting the installation. Usually, this means they look at just that aspect of your wiring addressed by the permit. One unfortunate consequence of tight city and county budgets is that jurisdictional inspectors tend to have large workloads. The result is that in most cases they have very little time for each inspection. Jurisdictions with limited funds also tend not to hire the skilled specialty-trade professionals needed to train and supervise their field inspectors.

As a result, such a jurisdiction often allows a qualified third party to perform that inspection in place of their employees. The result of this naturally varies from one Third Party Inspector to another.

• David has the credentials to work as a Third Party Inspector, though he does not take that official role at present.
• He is authorized by Maryland's Fire Marshal to inspect for any jurisdiction in Maryland, and earned that credential many years ago. He has not chosen to perform jurisdictional inspection, though he has no objection to doing so under suitable conditions, and generally maintains good relations with inspection authorities.
• Washington, D.C. authorized him to function as a Third-Party Inspector of single- and two-family residences. He has not done so since February, 2012; eventually he chose to drop from their roster.
• Some jurisdictions have asked him to hire on and join their inspection workforces.
• He also has been invited to perform contract inspections, for Frederick Maryland and for Laurel and Annapolis. While honored by the invitations, for different reasons at different times, he did not take up the offers.
• Similarly, one Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (meaning one of the authorized product-listing competitors to UL), offered David a job as a part-time Field Evaluation Engineer, checking that factories manufcturing electrical products complied with the listing requirements in safety standards. He turned down that honor as well.