Electrical Safety Checklist for Sarasota Homes Before Hurricane Season | CoHarbor Electric

We got a call a few Junes back from a homeowner near Longboat Key, maybe two days after the first named storm of the season started getting attention on the news. Nothing had hit yet — it was still way out in the Gulf, could’ve gone anywhere — but she wanted her seawall lighting checked because a breaker had started tripping every time it rained hard. Turned out the exterior GFCI covers along her dock had cracked from years of sun and salt air, and water had been getting into the boxes for who knows how long. Nobody had looked at that circuit since it was installed. It wasn’t an emergency yet. But two more weeks of afternoon storms and it would’ve been.

That’s basically the whole point of this checklist. Hurricane season in Sarasota isn’t really about the one big storm everybody’s watching on the news — it’s about the dozens of smaller weather events beforehand that quietly wear down anything electrical you’ve got sitting outside. By the time a real storm shows up, you want to already know your exterior electrical is solid, not find out the hard way at 2am with wind picking up.

Most of what we’re covering here doesn’t get much attention. It’s not the panel, it’s not the generator — we’ve written about both of those elsewhere. This one’s about everything electrical that lives outside the house: outlets, fixtures, dock and lift wiring, and the stuff overhead that people tend to forget is even part of their electrical system.

Start With the Exterior Outlets

Every outdoor receptacle at your place should be a GFCI outlet — that’s not optional under the electrical code, and it hasn’t been for a long time. NEC 210.8 requires ground-fault protection on outdoor receptacles specifically because water and electricity outside is a much different risk than water and electricity inside a dry hallway.

The part people skip: those little weatherproof covers over outdoor outlets have a lifespan. In-use covers (the kind that stay closed even with something plugged in) hold up fine for years. The older hinged flip-covers crack and warp faster than you’d think, especially on the west or south side of a house catching full sun most of the day. Once that cover’s compromised, rain gets into the box.

What to check: Push the test button on every exterior GFCI outlet. If it doesn’t trip and reset cleanly, that outlet needs attention before storm season, not after. And look at the covers themselves — if they’re brittle, faded, or the spring doesn’t snap them shut anymore, replace them. It’s a cheap fix that prevents a much bigger one.

We see this constantly in older Sarasota Springs homes where the original 1970s-era outdoor wiring is still technically functional but the protective hardware around it has quietly failed.

Dock, Lift, and Seawall Wiring

If you’re anywhere near the water — and a lot of Sarasota is — you’ve probably got some combination of dock lighting, a boat lift motor, or seawall electrical that most homeowners never think about until something stops working.

This wiring takes a beating that interior circuits never see. Constant humidity, direct salt spray, sometimes actual submersion during a bad storm surge. Boat lift motors especially — we’ve pulled open junction boxes near McClellan Park and found corrosion so advanced the wire nuts had practically dissolved.

What to check:

• Have dock and lift wiring inspected for corrosion at connection points, not just visual condition of the cable jacket
• Confirm any submersible or wet-location equipment is actually rated for that use — not every fixture sold as “outdoor” is rated for direct water contact
• Check that GFCI protection extends to marine and dock circuits specifically, which the code requires given the proximity to water

If your dock electrical hasn’t been looked at professionally in a few years, hurricane season is the wrong time to find out something’s degraded.

Trees, Branches, and the Line Coming Into Your House

This one gets overlooked because it feels like a landscaping issue, not an electrical one. But the service drop — the line running from the utility pole to your house — needs real clearance from tree limbs, and that clearance shrinks every year trees aren’t trimmed.

FPL maintains vegetation management standards specifically because branches rubbing against a service line or weatherhead during high wind is one of the more common causes of outages and, worse, downed line hazards during storms. We’ve been out to Vamo-area properties after summer storms where a single overgrown oak limb took out service to half a street.

What to check:

• Walk your property line and look up. Are any branches touching or close to the wire running to your house?
• If limbs are close to the service drop or the weatherhead itself, don’t trim it yourself near that wire. Call FPL or have us coordinate — that’s not a DIY job when there’s a live conductor a few feet away.
• Look at the mast and weatherhead connection itself for corrosion or looseness while you’re at it. Salt air affects that hardware too, and a loose weatherhead is a water-intrusion point during driving rain.

Exterior Lighting and Landscape Circuits

Landscape lighting transformers, low-voltage circuits, exterior fixtures — these tend to be an afterthought until half of them stop working and nobody can figure out why. Usually it’s water intrusion at a connection that was never quite sealed right to begin with.

What to check:

• Confirm low-voltage transformer boxes are elevated off grade and not sitting in standing water after rain
• Look for any exposed splice connections in landscape wiring — these should be inside waterproof connectors, not just twisted and taped
• Test that exterior lighting still functions on its designated circuit and hasn’t been drawing off an overloaded interior circuit as a workaround from a past repair

None of this is dramatic. It’s just the kind of thing that fails quietly for months and then becomes a bigger problem during the one week you actually need it working.

Before You Evacuate or Hunker Down

A few things worth doing in the day or two before a storm actually arrives, regardless of what you find in the checklist above:

• Unplug non-essential exterior equipment — landscape lighting transformers, pool equipment that isn’t storm-rated, anything you can physically disconnect rather than leave energized
• Know where your main disconnect is and how to shut it off if you need to evacuate or if water starts entering the structure
• If you have a whole-house surge protector, confirm it’s actually still functioning — most have an indicator light, and a dead unit gives you zero protection during the exact event it was installed for

A Note on Common Mistakes We See

The biggest one: people assume if something’s “outdoor rated,” it’s maintenance-free forever. It isn’t. Salt air, UV exposure, and constant moisture cycle faster than most manufacturers design for in non-coastal climates. The second most common mistake is DIY trimming near a service line — we understand the instinct to just handle it yourself, but that’s genuinely one of the more dangerous things a homeowner can attempt around the house.

Get Your Exterior Electrical Checked Before the Season Gets Going

We’d rather walk your property in May and catch a cracked GFCI cover or a corroded dock connection than get the panic call once wind’s already picking up. Coharbor Electric is licensed and insured, and we handle exterior electrical inspections across Sarasota — outdoor outlets, dock and lift wiring, landscape circuits, and service line clearance concerns — before hurricane season turns a small issue into an outage or a hazard. If it’s been a while since anyone’s looked at what’s outside your house, give us a call and we’ll get it checked before the next storm starts building out in the Gulf.