If you have ever tried to determine who to contact about an electrical field evaluation, unlisted equipment, permitting question, or inspection requirement, you probably already know the problem: finding the right Authority Having Jurisdiction can sometimes be surprisingly difficult.

A city website may have separate pages for building, electrical inspections, permitting, planning, and community development. A county may handle services that appear to belong to the city. Contact information can be buried several pages deep. And sometimes the hardest part of resolving an equipment compliance question is simply figuring out who to ask.

Lewis Bass decided to do something about it.

Meet the Lewis Bass AHJ Finder

The AHJ Finder is a new tool developed by Lewis Bass to help contractors, equipment manufacturers, facility owners, engineers, and other professionals locate publicly available building department information more quickly.

Using the tool is intentionally simple. Enter a city, ZIP code, and state, and the system goes to work identifying the government agency and building department information associated with that location.

Rather than sending you off with a list of search results, the goal is to build an easy-to-understand AHJ profile containing useful information such as the department name, public email address, telephone number, mailing address, jurisdiction type, and official government website when that information is available.

That means less time digging through municipal websites and more time actually solving the compliance question that brought you there in the first place.

Built With Field Evaluations in Mind

Lewis Bass works with Authorities Having Jurisdiction throughout the United States as part of our electrical field evaluation work. We know firsthand how important communication with the local building official or electrical authority can be when dealing with unlisted industrial machinery and electrical equipment.

That experience influenced how the AHJ Finder was designed.

When contact information is located, users can quickly prepare an email asking the jurisdiction about its policy for field evaluation of unlisted electrical equipment. The tool can also provide direct access to the official government source so that information can be independently verified.

This is especially useful because field evaluation requirements are not necessarily identical from one jurisdiction to another. The local AHJ ultimately plays an important role in determining what documentation and approvals will be accepted for a particular installation.

A Resource That Can Get Better Over Time

We aren’t treating this as a finished directory.

The Lewis Bass system is designed to build a growing database of AHJ information as searches are completed and contacts are verified. Jurisdiction profiles can also contain information about local field evaluation policies when those requirements become known.

If a contact changes, users can report outdated information so it can be reviewed.

Our long-term goal is to create an increasingly useful resource for anyone trying to navigate the intersection of equipment compliance, field evaluation, permitting, and local electrical requirements.

Give It a Try

The AHJ Finder is available directly through the Lewis Bass website.

Enter the city, ZIP code, and state associated with your project and let the tool do some of the detective work for you.

And if the reason you’re searching for an AHJ happens to be a piece of unlisted electrical equipment, you’ve already found the other half of the equation.

Lewis Bass is an IAS-accredited Field Evaluation Body providing field evaluation services for industrial electrical equipment and machinery. Once you find the AHJ, we can help you tackle the equipment.

Find your AHJ. Understand the requirements. Get the equipment evaluated. Get the project moving.