Electrician · Riverdale, Utah
Riverdale still follows the Weber. We wire the homes that line it — the 1950s ramblers off Parker Drive, the shops along Riverdale Road, and everything the freeways cut through in between.
The Ground Under Your Panel
Before it was Riverdale it was Jack Thompson's Settlement, and before anyone agreed on that it was Stringtown, and to some it was simply Union. The names tell you the shape of the place: houses strung in a line along the Weber River, because the river was the reason to be there at all.
James Graham and his sons broke ground here around 1850 and farmed it. Industry showed up three years later, when Daniel Burch put up a grist mill — a saw mill followed a couple of years after that. In 1858 the LDS apostle John Taylor bought the mill and expanded it, and the little riverside settlement started acting like a town. Hugh Findlay manufactured matches. A blacksmith set up shop. A canning factory came in. By 1878, Riverdale counted 211 residents, all of them living within earshot of moving water.
Every trade that ever mattered here started at the river and worked outward. Grain, timber, matches, tin cans — and eventually, copper wire. — Why we like working in this town
The thing that changed Riverdale wasn't the mill. It was Hill Field, opened just south of town in 1940 and known today as Hill Air Force Base. Overnight, a farming settlement had a payroll of thousands next door. Riverdale incorporated as a town on March 4, 1946, took city status in July of 1956, and watched its population go from 871 in 1950 to 1,848 in 1960 — more than double in ten years.
Now two interstate freeways and a mainline railroad run through a city of a few square miles. I-15 and I-84 meet here. Riverdale Road turned into one of the busiest retail corridors in northern Utah. Not bad for Stringtown.
First settlers work the ground along the Weber River.
A saw mill follows within two years. Industry arrives.
Match manufacturing, a blacksmith shop, and a canning factory follow.
Still a river settlement, still called Stringtown by some.
The defense installation becomes the region's dominant employer.
Ten years later, on July 7, 1956, Riverdale becomes a city.
Up from 871 in 1950. The postwar rambler boom, in one number.
How the Lights Came On
Riverdale never built its own generating plant. It didn't need to. Ogden was electrified in the 1880s, and northern Utah's scattered local light-and-power companies spent the next forty years merging into one another until Utah Power & Light consolidated most of them in the 1910s and '20s. Lines pushed south out of Ogden along the wagon roads, and the farms strung along the Weber were close enough to the mainline to get hooked up early — first for lights, then for pumps and milking machines, then for everything else.
Hill Field is what turned a rural distribution system into a real one. A base that size needs firm, redundant capacity, and the transmission built to serve it in the 1940s ran right past a town of a few hundred people. Riverdale grew into infrastructure that had been sized for somebody else — which is the quiet reason a small city here can support a retail corridor like Riverdale Road at all.
Today Riverdale is served by Rocky Mountain Power, the Utah division of PacifiCorp and the direct successor to Utah Power & Light. Electrical work in the city is permitted and inspected through Riverdale City, and everything we install is done to the National Electrical Code as adopted by the State of Utah.
Local Conditions
Three distinct building eras sit within a mile of each other here, and each one fails in its own particular way.
What's left of the original settlement — houses that were wired decades after they were built. Knob-and-tube remnants in attics, two-wire circuits with no equipment ground, fuse panels that someone "upgraded" with a 30-amp fuse in a 15-amp socket. We rewire these one circuit at a time and we don't guess.
The population more than doubled in the 1950s and the houses show it: fast, economical builds with 60- or 100-amp services that were generous in 1957 and are not generous now. Add a heat pump, a hot tub, and a car charger and the panel is the whole problem. Most of our Riverdale work is a service upgrade to 200 amps.
Newer subdivisions on the benches above the river, plus the commercial strip along Riverdale Road and the tenant spaces around the freeway interchange. Aluminum branch wiring shows up in the late-'60s and '70s stock. Commercial spaces need three-phase work, sign circuits, and lighting retrofits that pass inspection the first time.
One more thing specific to here: a mainline railroad and two interstates run through this city, and the ground near them carries vibration and moisture that older outdoor services were never detailed for. If your meter base is on the freeway side of the house and the cover has been rattling loose for a few years, that's not cosmetic. Call us before it's a repair with a scorch mark attached.
Services
Residential and commercial, permitted and inspected, from a single dead outlet to a full commercial build-out.
Don't see what you need? We do it anyway — call and describe the problem.
Same-day diagnostics, upfront pricing, and licensed work that passes inspection. We're minutes from Riverdale Road.
(801) 555-0142 Mon–Sat · Emergency service available