What to do right now
If you can smell burning, or see scorching round a socket or at the board, turn the main switch off and leave it off. The main switch is the big one on the consumer unit. Do not reset a breaker that tripped while something was smelling hot: the device did its job and putting it back feeds the fault again. If there is water coming into anything electrical, isolate first and worry about the water second.
If the whole house is dead, look out of the window before you look at the board. If the street is dark, or a neighbour is also off, it is a network fault and an electrician cannot help you: ring 105. That is the free national number and it reaches whoever distributes electricity in your area, at any hour. Ring it as well if your own board looks untouched and the problem is upstream, at the sealed fuse where the supply enters the house. That cut-out belongs to the network operator, it carries their seal, and no electrician is permitted to break it. Anyone who offers to is telling you something about themselves.
If only part of the house is dead, that is yours. Go to the board and look for one device sitting in a different position from the rest. If an RCD has tripped, unplug everything on the affected circuits, reset it, then plug the appliances back in one at a time and wait a moment between each. Whichever one trips it again is the fault, and you have just diagnosed it for nothing. Showers, immersion heaters, kettles, outside lights and anything in a garage are the usual suspects. If it will not reset with everything unplugged, the fault is in the fixed wiring and that is a visit.
What genuinely cannot wait: burning smells, scorch marks, anything hot to the touch, exposed live conductors, water in a consumer unit, no power at all in a let property, and a total loss of light in a building where somebody cannot safely get out in the dark. What can safely wait for morning: one dead socket, a single light not working, a circuit you have isolated and can leave off, an immersion heater with the gas boiler still running. We will tell you which of the two you have on the phone, and if it is the second we will say so rather than charge you a night rate for it.
What a callout covers
Making it safe first, then telling you what it will take to put right.
- Answered at any hour, seven days a week, including bank holidays
- Triage on the phone, including telling you when to ring 105 instead
- Fault traced rather than parts guessed at
- Made safe and isolated before anything else is discussed
- A price for the repair before the repair starts
- The circuit tested before it is put back into service
- Certification for anything replaced or altered
How a callout runs
The phone call
What is off, what it smells like, whether the street is dark. That decides whether we come out or you ring 105.
Make safe
Isolate the fault so the rest of the building can stay in use, before anything is priced.
Find it
Traced with instruments. Splitting a circuit down finds the fault rather than replacing things in hope.
Repair and test
Priced before it starts, tested before the circuit goes back into service.
Emergency callouts across Worcester and Worcestershire
Worcester and the ring of towns around it: Droitwich Spa, Malvern, Pershore and Evesham. Stratford-upon-Avon is the furthest run east and worth a phone call first so we can tell you straight how long we will be. Most callouts end as fault finding once the thing is safe, and where the cause is a board that cannot isolate circuits properly, a board upgrade is what stops it happening again.
Something sparking or tripping right now?
Turn the main switch off and ring. If the street is dark, ring 105 first, because that one is not ours to fix.
What happens when you ring, and what the call-out covers
The call is free and it is the fastest way to find out whether you need anybody tonight. We will ask what has happened, what you can see at the board and whether anything smells hot, and a good proportion of calls end there: a tripped RCD that will reset once the offending appliance is unplugged does not need a van. If it does need somebody, the call-out is from £75 and that covers coming out and finding the fault. The repair is a separate number and it is written down before it is done. We will not give you a response time on the phone that we cannot keep, which is why you will get a real one rather than a promise of thirty minutes.
