Electricians for the strip between the lake and the mountains

A narrow county with a long memory

Davis County was created on October 5, 1850, by the legislature of the provisional State of Deseret, and named for Daniel C. Davis, a captain in the Mormon Battalion. Farmington became the county seat for a practical reason that still shows up on a map today: it sits almost exactly halfway between the Weber River in the north and the Jordan River in the south, which made it the one place everyone could reach.

The shape of the county explains almost everything about the electrical work here. It is a narrow ribbon of benchland squeezed between the Great Salt Lake on the west and the Wasatch Range rising sharply on the east. There is nowhere to sprawl, so the county has instead filled in — densely, and in distinct waves — leaving neighborhoods a mile apart that were wired thirty or seventy years apart.

Slow farms, then a very fast fifty years

For its first half century, Davis County grew slowly. Settlers came for the fertile bench soils and the mountain streams pouring out of the Wasatch canyons, and they farmed. When the Utah Central Rail Road arrived in 1870, it brought mechanized agriculture, commerce, and the first electric lighting to homes and businesses along the line. Even so, the county's population had barely reached 16,000 by 1940.

Then came Hill Air Force Base. Established in the northern end of the county, it turned Davis into a civilian employment center almost overnight. The population doubled between 1940 and 1950, and doubled again between 1950 and 1960 — the local face of the national suburban boom. Clearfield's Naval Supply Depot pulled in the same direction. By 2020 the county held 362,679 people and formed a core piece of both the Ogden-Clearfield and the Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem metro areas.

Fifteen cities, no two alike

Bountiful, incorporated in 1892, was the second settlement in Utah and still carries the oldest housing stock in the county. Kaysville trades on its schools, Syracuse on its west-side subdivisions, Farmington on Lagoon and the county offices, Layton on being the biggest city here in both population and area. West Bountiful was farmland within living memory. Fruit Heights, Sunset, and South Weber are small enough that we usually know the street before the address is finished.

Old grid, new demand

Davis County sits inside PacifiCorp's East (PACE) load center, which delivers power to more than 75 percent of Utah's population — the urban corridor running through Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Weber counties. Only one active electricity production plant sits inside the county itself; nearly everything else arrives over transmission lines that cross it.

Those lines, substations and transmission systems are aging, and demand keeps climbing as households electrify — heat pumps, induction ranges, two EVs in a garage that was wired for one lightbulb and a deep freeze. The utilities are working on their end. Our end is your side of the meter, and that is usually where the bottleneck actually is.

Which brings us to the housing. A very large share of Davis County's homes went up during the post-war boom, when the population doubled twice in twenty years to house Hill Air Force Base workers. That means street after street of houses built to a 1950s electrical standard, still carrying a 2020s electrical load.