A lease gets signed on square footage, location and rent. The electrical gets discovered in week two, and by then it belongs to you. What to look at in a bay before you commit, and the one question that decides everything.
A lease gets signed on square footage, location and rent. The electrical gets discovered in week two, and by then it belongs to you.
Taking over a commercial bay or a leased shop is one of the few situations where an hour of looking before you sign changes the number at the bottom of the page. The building does not care what you intend to do in it. What matters is what is already there, what the last tenant did to it, and whether the gap between that and your equipment is a day of work or a service upgrade.
Four things, and only the first is obvious.
None of that appears on a listing, and a landlord showing the space may not know the answers either. That is not evasion — most building owners have never had reason to ask.
Before capacity, before panel spaces, before anything: find out whether the bay has three-phase power.
If your equipment is three phase and the building is not, that is not a wiring change — it is either a utility service change or a conversion at every machine, and both are significant. If the building has three phase and you only need single, you have options and no problem. The point is that this is binary, it is expensive to get wrong, and it is answerable in one question before you commit to anything. The full version of that problem is in running three-phase equipment in a single-phase shop.
Worth saying plainly: people sign leases and then find this out. It is the single most common expensive surprise in a shop move.
The next question is whether the existing service can carry your work, and it is a calculation rather than a guess.
What goes into it:
A bay that was a warehouse and is becoming a machine shop is a different building electrically, even though nothing about it looks different. Panels, feeders and distribution are covered under panels and equipment power.
This is where the unbudgeted money goes.
Opening the panel cover and looking is a fifteen-minute job that tells an electrician a great deal: how full it is, how it was worked on, whether anything is overheating, and whether the next person to touch it is in for an archaeology project.
The lighting in a bay reflects what the last tenant did in it. A warehouse is lit for aisles, a retail bay for display, a repair shop for work at bench and floor height. Moving into someone else’s layout and discovering you cannot see what you are doing is routine.
Two things worth settling early: whether the existing fixtures are worth keeping, and whether the layout suits your work rather than theirs. Retrofit work and new high-bay are covered under commercial lighting, and if the bay already has high bay fixtures that keep dying, why high-bay LED fixtures fail early explains what is usually behind it.
Most commercial leases split electrical responsibility somewhere, and where they split it varies. The questions that matter:
That is a lease question rather than an electrical one, and it is worth having your own eyes on the wording before signing. What an electrician can give you is the technical half: what the space needs, what it would cost, and what is already wrong with it — which is exactly what you need in hand before negotiating any of the above.
New circuits, panel work, a service change and equipment connections are installed electrical work and generally require a permit, with inspection by the authority having jurisdiction. Two consequences worth planning around: permitted work has to be done by a licensed electrical contractor, and inspection is a scheduled event rather than an instant one.
There is a second reason to care. Unpermitted work left by a previous tenant does not become compliant by being old, and it is the kind of thing that surfaces at the worst moment — an insurance question, a later inspection, or a fire. Specifics depend on the municipality and the scope, and are worth confirming rather than assuming.
The electrical work on a fit-up is not usually the long part. The long parts are the things it depends on:
A shop that opens two weeks late because a feeder was ordered too late is a far more common story than one that opens late because the wiring took too long.
Take these on your phone while you are in the space, and send them to an electrician before you sign:
Yes, and that is the right time to ask. A walkthrough with your equipment list produces a straight answer on capacity, phase and what the fit-up involves. Finding out afterwards means negotiating from a much weaker position.
It usually means it was fine for the last tenant, which is a different statement. A bay that comfortably ran a storage business can be well short for a shop with a welder, a compressor and heat. It is worth verifying rather than assuming, and verifying is not expensive.
The meter and main equipment show it, and the landlord or the distribution utility can confirm it. A photo of the meter and the main disconnect is generally enough for an electrician to tell you.
Then it is better to know before it is yours. Deficiencies found during a walkthrough are something you can raise in negotiation. Deficiencies found in month three are an expense.
Connecting equipment is installed electrical work, and generally yes. It also has to be done by a licensed contractor to be permitted, which is worth factoring in rather than discovering after the machines are on the floor.
A walkthrough before signing takes about an hour and answers the questions that decide whether a space works for you. Call 403-872-8698 or send the details through the service request form. The address, a list of your equipment and the photos above are everything needed to start.
Related work is covered under commercial electrical, equipment and machine wiring and commercial, with local detail on the Red Deer page. Once you are in and running, the preventive maintenance checklist is the follow-on.
Grasse Electric serves Red Deer, Red Deer County, Blackfalds, Sylvan Lake, Penhold, Springbrook, Innisfail, Lacombe, Ponoka and Morningside.
Written by Todd Grasse, Red Seal Journeyman Electrician, Grasse Electric — Red Deer, Alberta. Published October 27, 2026.
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