Services · Tucson, Arizona
An apartment community is commercial construction wearing a residential face — a house service, a wall of tenant meters, a private underground system feeding every building, and site lighting that has to satisfy a dark-sky code. Arizona Electrical Solutions engineers and self-performs that infrastructure for owners, developers, and property managers across Tucson and statewide, under our KB-1 general building and CR-11 electrical licenses. Request a bid →
Multifamily Electrical
The first real decision on a multifamily project is not the panel — it is the metering architecture. Whether every unit gets its own meter in a stack or bank, what lands on the house meter instead, and where the service disconnects group all follow from that one choice, and each answer changes the service size, the gear order, and the conversation with the utility. NEC 210.25(B) draws the hard line: branch circuits serving common areas cannot be fed from an individual dwelling unit's panel. So the house panel is real, sized load — corridor and site lighting, gates and access control, irrigation controllers, booster pumps, elevators where there are any, laundry, the pool equipment pad, and every amenity building on the property.
To be plain about what this page is: this is owner-, developer-, and property-manager-side work on multifamily properties — apartment communities, garden apartments, student housing, and senior living — contracted and delivered as commercial construction under our KB-1 general building and CR-11 electrical licenses. It is not homeowner service work, and we do not run in-unit tenant service calls. If your project stacks apartments over retail or sits on a podium, that is a different set of problems, and we cover it on our mixed-use development page.
Tenant meter stacks and banks, CT cabinets, the house service and house panel, and service disconnects located and grouped the way Article 230 requires — with NEC 110.26 working clearance designed into the equipment room or the exterior wall rather than discovered at inspection.
Panel & service upgrades →Pads set to the utility's construction standards, secondary runs to each building, primary duct, pull boxes, and conduit under the drive aisles before paving — trenched and backfilled by our own operators on our own Cat equipment, on the civil contractor's schedule because we are the civil contractor.
Trenching & excavation →The amenity buildings are small commercial buildings: leasing office power and data, clubhouse and fitness circuits, laundry equipment loads, and pool and spa equipment wired under NEC Article 680 with the equipotential bonding grid the deck requires.
Service & distribution scope →Scoping It
Two communities with the same unit count can price very differently. When we bid multifamily work, these are the variables that actually move the number:
Individually metered units, a house meter carrying the common areas, or some blend of the two — the decision sets the gear count, the service size, the utility's requirements, and how the property bills residents for power later. It is worth settling in design, because changing it after the gear is released is expensive in both money and lead time.
A garden-style community spreads load across acres. Trench footage, transformer pad locations, secondary run lengths, voltage drop over those runs, and what the trench crosses — paving, curbs, existing utilities, caliche — are usually a bigger line item than the gear itself. We self-perform the excavation, so that number is ours to control instead of a subcontractor's to mark up.
TEP or Trico has to approve the design, the pad locations, and the metering before anything gets energized, and meter stacks, CT cabinets, and switchboards are built to order. On multifamily work the gear release date, not the labor, sets the critical path — so we design early enough to order early.
New construction on raw ground is one schedule. The same scope in an occupied community means building-by-building phasing, resident notices, planned outages scheduled outside quiet hours, unit access coordinated through management, and more mobilizations. How much of the property can be offline at once is a real cost driver, so we plan it with you up front.
Site & Underground
On a garden-style community, most of the electrical system is outside the buildings. Transformer pads get set where the utility will accept them and where the secondary runs stay short enough to hold voltage; primary and secondary duct, pull boxes, and building feeders go in before the paving does; and each building's meter stack gets fed from a system that has to be right the first time, because the second time it is under asphalt. Because trenching, backfill, and restoration are ours under the KA engineering license, the dig and the wire are one crew on one schedule — see trenching & excavation for how we run that side.
Southern Arizona adds its own conditions to that work. Caliche turns what looks like a routine trench into rock excavation, and pretending otherwise is how bids get blown; our operators expect it and price it. Monsoon storms fill open trenches and move backfill, so runs get opened and closed in short sections with restoration following daily behind the crew. Summer afternoons at 110 degrees push a community's air conditioning and its terminations at the same time, which is why conductor sizing gets the ambient correction it deserves and terminations get torqued to specification per NEC 110.14(D). And the lighting is not a free choice here: Tucson and Pima County enforce an outdoor lighting code written to protect the region's dark skies and the observatories around it, which governs shielding, mounting height, color temperature, and how much light your parking lot may put out — on top of whichever jurisdiction, City of Tucson or Pima County, is reviewing the permit.
So site lighting is a photometric exercise, not a fixture order. We model parking areas, drive aisles, walkways, carports, and amenity approaches to hit usable, uniform light levels that residents feel safe walking through, with the shielding and light-trespass limits the code requires and the exterior lighting power allowances the energy code sets — the same approach described on our parking lot lighting page. While that trench is open is also the cheapest moment the property will ever have to become EV-ready: conduit, pull boxes, and panel capacity installed now and sized for the Article 625 loads that will land on it, chargers mounted whenever demand and budget justify them. Make-ready costs a fraction of a return trip through finished paving.
Renovation & Repositioning
A large share of Tucson's rental stock was built decades ago, and the electrical system usually shows it first: meter stacks and panels whose manufacturers are long gone, services sized before anyone owned a second air conditioner or a car that charges, and a house panel with no spare spaces for the amenities a repositioning adds. That work gets phased — building by building, stack by stack — with temporary feeds where loads cannot drop, outages scheduled inside daytime hours residents are told about in advance, and the load calculations and one-lines produced by our own in-house engineering before any gear is ordered. The mechanics of it are the same discipline described on our panel and service upgrade page, multiplied across a property.
Older buildings also raise the aluminum question. Small-conductor aluminum branch circuits were common in construction of a certain era, and the concern is not the metal itself but the terminations — expansion, oxidation, and creep at devices and splices that were never made for it. We evaluate what is actually installed, then scope remediation using listed connectors and methods appropriate to the assembly, with terminations cleaned, treated where required, and torqued to specification. On larger aluminum feeders the same rules apply at the lugs. What we will not do is guess at the wire type from the year the property was built; the scope comes from opening panels and devices and documenting what is there.
Life safety is the part that fails inspection when a renovation is treated as cosmetic. Means of egress in a multifamily building has to stay illuminated, exit signage has to be right, emergency lighting has to carry the corridors and stairs for the full duration the fire inspector will test, and where a fire alarm system is required it has to be installed, tested, and documented to NFPA 72 with devices that survive the remodel around them. We keep those circuits live and compliant through every phase, and hand over the test records at closeout — the broader scope lives on our life-safety systems page.
Self-Performed
Engineering, electrical, and underground all sit in the same company, which is why the phase dates hold. No trenching sub to schedule around, no engineer waiting on somebody else's field measurements, no argument at the property line about whose scope the pad was.
Transformer pads, primary and secondary duct, pull boxes, and building feeders installed to the utility's standards — trench, conduit, wire, and restoration by one crew on one schedule.
Parking, walkway, and carport lighting modeled photometrically, shielded for the dark-sky code, and fed from the house system — with EV conduit dropped in the same trench while it is open.
FAQ
Because multifamily is commercial construction. Our contracts are with the owner, the developer, or the property-management company, and the work is the property's infrastructure: the house service, the tenant meter stacks, the underground distribution between buildings, the site and parking lighting, the amenity buildings, and the life-safety systems in the corridors. That is delivered under our KB-1 general building and CR-11 electrical licenses, permitted and inspected as commercial work. What we do not do is homeowner service work or in-unit tenant service calls — if a resident's bedroom outlet stops working, that is your maintenance team's call, not ours.
It is the decision everything else hangs on. Individual tenant meters put usage on the resident and keep the owner's bill to the common areas, but they mean a full meter stack or bank per building, more gear, more utility coordination, and a larger service. A house-metered property is simpler to build and gives the owner control, but the owner then carries the consumption and has to deal with how that gets recovered. Either way, NEC 210.25(B) requires common-area branch circuits to be fed from house equipment rather than a dwelling unit's panel, so the house panel exists regardless. We model both directions with the utility's requirements and your operating plan in view, then design the service around the answer.
Yes — most repositioning and upgrade work is done in fully leased communities. We phase it building by building or stack by stack, use temporary feeds where loads cannot drop, and schedule outages during daytime hours with written notice management can post for residents. Our crews start at 6 a.m., which puts the loudest work early in the day and well clear of evening quiet hours. We run scheduled daytime service and do not market ourselves as an after-hours emergency contractor; urgent items get the earliest slot on the schedule.
Install the infrastructure and skip the hardware. Make-ready means the conduit, stub-ups, pull boxes, feeder pathway, and reserved panel capacity go in now — ideally in the same trench as the site lighting or a distribution upgrade — so chargers mount later without re-opening finished paving. We size the electrical room and the feeder for a build-out target rather than day-one demand, and where capacity is tight, load management under NEC Article 625 lets more ports share less service. Doing it in the open trench costs a fraction of coming back later.
It constrains how the light gets delivered, not whether residents get enough of it. Fixture shielding and optics, mounting height, color temperature, light trespass at the property line, and total site output are all governed — Southern Arizona's rules exist to keep the observatories around the region usable — and the energy code layers exterior lighting power allowances on top of that. For a community it means the parking field, the carport bays, and the walkways between buildings get modeled photometrically rather than picked by fixture count: light aimed down and held on the property, at levels uniform enough that residents are not walking between bright pools and dark gaps on the way to their door. Carports are usually the tightest of the three, because the fixture has to light the bay without spilling past the canopy edge.
It gets evaluated, not assumed. Small-conductor aluminum branch circuits show up in buildings of that era, and the risk lives at the terminations — expansion, oxidation, and loosening at devices and splices — rather than in the conductor itself. We open panels and devices, document what is actually installed, and scope remediation with listed connectors and methods appropriate to the assembly, with terminations cleaned, treated where required, and torqued to specification per NEC 110.14(D). Where feeders are aluminum, the same care applies at the lugs. You get a scoped, prioritized list rather than a blanket rewire recommendation.
The drivers, in roughly the order they matter: the metering architecture and how much gear it takes; the distance the power has to travel, since trench footage through caliche and under paving is often the largest single line item; whether the utility service and transformers have to grow with the project; how much of the scope is site lighting, EV make-ready, and amenity work; and how tightly the phasing has to fit around occupied buildings. We do not price multifamily from a per-unit rule of thumb. Send the site plan, the unit count, and photos of the existing meter stacks and house gear, and we will come back with a scoped, phased, line-item bid.
Related Services
One contractor carries the whole scope. See every service we self-perform.
Podium and retail-over-residential projects — phased utilities, separated services, one design-build contract.
Panelboard, switchboard, and service-entrance upgrades with load calcs, TEP coordination, and phased shutdowns.
Level 2 and DC fast charging — engineered, trenched, and wired.
Photometric design, LED conversions, pole repair, bases, and feeders.
Send us the site plan, the unit count, and photos of the existing meter stacks and house gear. We'll scope the metering, the site distribution, and the lighting together and come back with a phased, line-item bid.
Request a Bid Call (520) 308-6235