Emergency Electricians near you

Make the situation safe and leave the diagnosis to the electrician. If burning smells are coming from the consumer unit or a socket, switch that circuit off at the board if you can reach it safely, unplug what you can reach without touching anything hot or damaged, and keep people away from it. Do not keep resetting a breaker that refuses to stay on. It is holding a fault open, and each reset puts the fault back under power.

Water changes the order of the work. If water is running anywhere near the consumer unit, a socket or a light fitting, do not touch the water or the electrics, and turn the supply off at the main switch only if you can do that without standing in water. Get the leak stopped as well as the circuit isolated, because an electrician cannot certify a circuit that is still being rained on from the flat above.

Two situations skip the electrician entirely for the first call. If there is fire, or if anyone has had a shock and feels unwell, that is 999 first. An electrician comes afterwards, to find out why it happened and to put it right.

Working out which side of the meter the problem sits on saves a call-out you may not need. Ofgem's advice is to report a power cut to the network operator, and it links households to the Powercut 105 service to identify the operator covering their address. That operator looks after the wires and the supply running to the property. Your energy supplier is a different company, and Ofgem notes that a problem traced to a faulty meter is one for the supplier rather than the network.

Inside the property, the pattern of what is off tells most of the story. A whole house dark while the neighbours have light points at your main switch, at the incoming supply equipment, or at a fault severe enough to take everything out at once. One dead circuit with the rest of the house working points at a protective device that has operated for a reason. Sockets dead downstairs but working upstairs, one room in darkness, or an electric shower that has stopped while everything else runs are all worth noting before you ring anyone.

An emergency visit is about making the installation safe rather than finishing the job. Expect the electrician to isolate and test, identify the circuit at fault, disconnect or make safe whatever cannot be repaired there and then, and leave the rest of the house working wherever that is possible. Sometimes the honest outcome is that one circuit stays off overnight and a proper repair is booked for daylight, which is a better result than an untested fix nobody can certify.

Ask what was found, what was done and what is still outstanding, and ask for it in writing before the van leaves. Work carried out in an emergency still has to meet BS 7671, and it still produces the certificate appropriate to what was done, so a visit that generates no paperwork at all is worth questioning.

LokalMatch handles the introduction rather than the call-out. You describe what has happened once, with your postcode, and electricians covering your area get in touch with you directly. The pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not attend, does not carry out the work, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend any of the businesses that reply, so the questions about scheme registration and what is included remain yours to ask.

Part P of the Building Regulations covers electrical safety in dwellings, and Approved Document P is the statutory guidance that goes with it in England, explaining when work has to be notified. Government guidance on when you need building regulations approval puts two jobs householders recognise on that list: replacing fuse boxes and connected electrics, and changing electrics near a bath or shower. The same guidance says you do not need to get approval yourself if you use someone registered with a competent person scheme.

An emergency repair often falls outside those categories, but the replacement that follows it may not. If a damaged board has to be swapped, or a shower circuit reworked once the emergency is over, that is the moment to ask who is notifying the work and what certificate will arrive afterwards.

The route differs around the United Kingdom. Welsh Government guidance says most electrical work needs either an installer registered with a competent person scheme or approval from a building control body, and that a registered installer arranges for you to receive a building regulations compliance certificate within 30 days of the work being completed. Scotland works under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003, where local authority verifiers grant building warrants and completion certificates and technical handbooks take the place of approved documents. In Northern Ireland the Department of Finance makes the building regulations under the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) Order 1979, and district councils enforce them within their boundaries.

If anyone in the household would be at real risk during a long power cut, register before it happens rather than during it. Ofgem explains that your energy supplier and your network operator each keep a Priority Services Register, and that you can join if you have reached state pension age, are pregnant or have young children, live with a disability or a long-term medical condition, or find English difficult, with help also available through temporary changes such as recovering from an injury or a bereavement. The register offers advance notice of scheduled power cuts wherever possible, and priority support in an emergency.

Emergency work is priced on time and uncertainty far more than on the component that eventually gets replaced. A fault that announces itself at the board is a different job from one hiding in a cable under a floor, even when the repair itself is identical.