This calculator is built as a room-by-room walk-through, not a form you fill out from memory. You move through six areas of your home one at a time: Kitchen, Bathroom, Garage and Outdoor, Bedrooms and Living areas, Basement and Laundry, and a Final Walk that looks for signs that do not belong to any single room. Each area asks four to five questions about things you can actually see or notice right now, without opening an outlet, a panel, or any wiring, and without touching anything electrical.
Before you start, you confirm that this is an observational self-audit, not a licensed inspection. You are also asked whether you own or rent the home. That answer does not change any status below. It only changes the final recommendation, since an owner is pointed toward a qualified electrician while a renter is pointed toward documenting the issue for a landlord or property manager.
As you answer, a route across the top of the calculator tracks where you are, room by room, with a checkmark on each area once every question in it is answered. Each room also opens with a short “Look here” list naming the two to four things worth actually looking at before you answer, since the point is a physical walk, not a list of abstract questions.
Most questions offer a third option beyond yes and no: “Can’t tell.” This applies only to a handful of questions that genuinely require some knowledge to observe, such as whether an outlet has visible Test and Reset buttons, which is how GFCI protection is usually identified without any tools. An answer of “Can’t tell” is kept as its own status instead of being silently counted as safe, because not being able to confirm something is not the same as confirming it is fine. A few of these questions carry a small “Why this question appears” note, explaining in one line that GFCI protection is required in various wet and damp locations under different NEC editions, that requirements vary by edition and installation, and that some homes provide this protection from a breaker in the panel instead of the outlet itself, in which case the outlet will not show a visible button even though it is protected. That is a reference point, not a claim about whether your specific home is compliant.
Once all six areas are answered, you reach a home snapshot instead of a single score. Each area gets its own tile and its own status: Clear, Watch, Urgent, or Unconfirmed. Clicking a tile expands it to show exactly which observations led to that status, so the result is never just a color you have to take on faith. The calculator does not average these into one number, because a warm outlet in the kitchen and an unconfirmed GFCI outlet in the garage call for different actions, and collapsing them into one figure would hide that difference.
Above the tiles, a one-line summary reflects the worst thing you found, in plain language rather than a score. If any area contains an Urgent item, a separate “Needs attention first” panel appears. It exists because a small number of signs are tied to a disproportionate share of home fire deaths even though they cause a comparatively small share of fires. Home heating equipment, including space heaters, is a documented example of this pattern in NFPA research. Inside this panel, items are split into two kinds: something happening right now, such as a burning smell or a warm outlet, is listed first with a “stop using this now” instruction, while a risky setup, such as a heater plugged into an extension cord, is listed after with a “change this before you use it again” instruction. Neither kind is turned into a hidden point value added to a score.
Below that, a separate “Patterns across your home” section only appears when the same kind of issue turns up in more than one area, such as a heat-producing device on a cord in two different rooms, or GFCI protection you could not confirm in more than one wet area. This does not add a new question or a new weight. It simply looks back across what you already answered and points out repetition that is easy to miss when each room is reviewed on its own.
Here is what that looks like on a real run. Say the kitchen has GFCI-style outlets confirmed and nothing else flagged, so it comes back Clear. The garage has an outlet you cannot confirm has Test and Reset buttons and an outdoor outlet with no intact weatherproof cover, so it comes back Watch. In a bedroom, a space heater is plugged into an extension cord for the winter, so that bedroom comes back Urgent. Everything else in the house is Clear. The result reads 4 Clear, 1 Watch, 1 Urgent, and the “Needs attention first” panel lists exactly one line: the bedroom heater and cord combination, filed as a risky setup rather than something actively happening, with the instruction to move it to a wall outlet and avoid that combination going forward.
Below the snapshot, the full checklist repeats every flagged item grouped by status, each group followed by one plain-language next step. If nothing was flagged anywhere in the six areas, this section says so directly instead of showing an empty list. A short note underneath explains why heating equipment gets this treatment even on its own, regardless of what your specific result was.
The last function on the results screen turns your answers into something you can actually use. It collects every Urgent and Watch item, by room, into a short block of text you can copy and hand to a qualified electrician, or to a landlord if you are renting. Items marked Unconfirmed are left out of this message on purpose, since not being able to confirm something is not the same as reporting a defect. You can also save the full checklist as a text file or print the page directly, which keeps the snapshot and checklist and hides the interactive controls.
This tool does not determine code compliance, measure electrical load, or find problems hidden inside walls, outlets, panels, or wiring. If any area comes back Urgent, the recommendation is the same regardless of what caused it: stop using the affected outlet or device and have it checked by a qualified electrician before continuing to use it.