Emergency Electrician Across British Columbia

What to check before you call an emergency electrician

Work through this list first. It costs nothing and it takes about five minutes.

• Is it one outlet, one room, or the whole house? One dead outlet points at the outlet or at the thing plugged into it. One dead room points at a breaker. A partial power loss in house circuits — half the lights out and the rest fine — points at the panel or at the supply coming in. The whole street dark is BC Hydro's problem, not yours.
• Has a breaker tripped? Open the panel and look along the row. A tripped breaker usually sits in the middle rather than hard off, which is why it is easy to miss. Push it fully off, then firmly back on. If it holds, plug things back in one at a time and watch which one takes it out again.
• Is it the appliance? Unplug everything on that circuit, reset the breaker, then plug things back in one at a time. Plenty of dead circuits turn out to be one failed kettle, heater or power bar.
• Is a switch just off? More than one dead outlet has been a wall switch somebody knocked. Worth thirty seconds before anything else.

GFCI won't reset? Try this first

A GFCI is the outlet with the two small buttons marked test and reset. They live in bathrooms, kitchens, garages, basements and outside, and one of them often feeds several ordinary outlets further down the line. So a dead bedroom plug can be a tripped GFCI out in the garage. Press reset firmly — you should feel it click.

If the GFCI keeps tripping, or it will not reset at all, something on that circuit is leaking current to ground. Often that is a wet outdoor outlet after a run of rain. Sometimes it is the GFCI itself, worn out. Unplug everything on the circuit and try once more. If it still will not hold, leave it off and call.

Three more you will recognise:

• Power flickering on and off across the whole house when a big appliance starts is usually the supply or a loose connection ahead of the panel. Worth a call. Not usually worth 2am.
• A breaker that keeps tripping is telling you the circuit is carrying more than it should, or there is a fault on it. Do not keep resetting it.
• An outlet not working with nothing tripped is usually a GFCI or a wall switch. If both are fine, it is a fault in the wiring behind the wall.

When to call an emergency electrician, and when it can wait until morning

Most electrical faults wait.

If the fault could start a fire or shock someone, it is now. If it is an inconvenience, it is the morning. Heat, smell, smoke, sparks and water are the now list. A dead circuit with nothing hot and nothing smelling is almost always the morning list.

These usually wait:

• One dead outlet with nothing else wrong
• A breaker that tripped once, reset, and has stayed on since
• A light fitting that has stopped working
• A room with no power on a mild day, with nothing hot to touch

These do not wait. The short version is anything you can smell or see burning, anything sparking, water near the panel, and a breaker that will not stay on.

One symptom on its own is usually an annoyance. A second symptom is what turns it into a call. A dead outlet is a dead outlet. A dead outlet plus lights flickering in the same part of the house is a different problem, and that one is worth phoning about the same night.

What an emergency electrical service costs

An emergency electrical service is priced here the same way our daytime work is.

One outlet or a full rewire, priced the same way. We come out for the small jobs.

The consultation and the estimate are free. Tracing a fault is not. Fault-finding is $165 for a 45-minute diagnostic, and what it buys you is a straight answer: what the problem is, and how we are going to fix it. We print that number because a company that says everything is free and then hands you an invoice is how people end up angry. Better you know it before you dial.

You get the quote in writing before any work starts. A quote is priced on what we can see — if the scope changes we tell you before we do it, not after.

Permits, inspections, and what happens after an emergency repair

A night call ends one of two ways: the fault is found and the circuit is made safe, or the repair turns into permitted work. It is worth knowing which is which before anyone starts pulling things apart.

Making a circuit safe — taking a failed breaker out of service, disconnecting a burnt outlet, isolating a damaged run — is repair. Replacing a panel, running a new circuit, or rewiring a section of the house is permitted work in British Columbia, and it has to be filed and inspected.

• We pull the permit for whichever municipality your address sits in. You fill in nothing.
• We are there for the inspection. You are not left explaining someone else's wiring to an inspector.
• If an inspection does not pass on our work, we put it right, call the inspector back, and we cover the cost. Not you.
• We show you what we found and explain why it needs replacing — including anything unrelated we come across on the way. We tell you and get your approval before doing anything about it.

Who issues the permit depends on the city. Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission and Langley go through Technical Safety BC. Vancouver, Victoria, Surrey and Burnaby run their own electrical permit offices. Working out which one applies is our problem, not yours.

A fault traced at night sometimes turns out to be the panel itself: a breaker that will not hold because the panel is full, or old enough that parts are no longer made. That is an electrical panel upgrade, quoted properly in daylight, not something anyone should be selling you at 2am. The same goes for a recurring fault in old cloth-covered wiring or knob and tube wiring, and for a circuit that trips every time the car goes on charge, which is an EV charger installation problem rather than an emergency one.