Deerfield Beach Emergency Electrician: After-Hours Power Loss, Burning Smells and Storm Damage

The after-hours calls we take in Deerfield Beach come from three very different places: a unit in a beachfront or Century Village building where the outlets went dead, a canal-front ranch house in The Cove where the panel is buzzing, and a flex bay off Green Road or SW 10th Street where a compressor is humming and half the lights are out. Each one is a different problem with a different first step. 24/7 Electrician handles all three, and this page tells you what to do before the truck arrives. For an emergency electrician in Deerfield Beach at any hour, call (954) 602-0050. Someone answers at every hour and sends whichever electrician is closest.

Stop and Get Out If Any of This Is True

Electricians can fix most things. They cannot fix a fire that has already started, and they cannot undo a shock. Before you read further, check the following.

If there is smoke, flame, or a glow coming from a panel, an outlet, a light fixture or a wall, leave the building, close the door, and call 911 from outside. If a wire is down in the yard, on the roof, across a fence or in a puddle, stay away and keep everyone else away, and call the utility. If water is rising toward a panel or a meter and the main cannot be reached while standing on dry floor, leave the area. If anyone has felt a shock or a tingle from a dock, a pool ladder, a hose bib or a piece of equipment, get everyone clear of it and shut it off from the panel. None of those situations call for a flashlight and a closer look.

If the situation is not one of those, you have time to figure out what is going on, and the sections below are arranged by the kind of building you are standing in.

In a Condo or Apartment: Is It the Building or Your Unit?

Much of Deerfield Beach lives in multi-unit buildings, from the towers on the barrier island to the low-rise and mid-rise villages inland like Century Village and Crystal Lake. When the power goes out in a unit, the first thing to establish is whether the building has power.

Step into the corridor. If the hallway lights, the elevators and the exit signs are out, the failure is at the building's service, its main switchgear, or a riser, and that is an association and management company problem. They call the utility or their contractor, not you. If the corridor is lit and only your unit is dark, the failure is between the meter room and your unit panel, or inside your unit panel, and that is a call we can take, usually with management's help to get into the meter room.

Salt air on the oceanfront buildings makes the meter stack the usual suspect. A corroded jaw in the meter socket or a loose lug on the feeder to one unit will take that unit down while the neighboring units are fine, and it will often flicker for weeks first. In the 1970s inland villages, the compact unit panels those buildings were built with are now old enough that main breakers fail outright, and the small panels are often full of tandem breakers that have been running warm for years.

Partial power inside a unit is its own warning. If some outlets work and others do not, or the lights dim when the air conditioning starts and brighten when it stops, there may be a lost neutral on the feeder. That condition pushes one half of the unit's circuits toward high voltage and can destroy appliances and electronics. Switch off and unplug whatever you can, then call. It is not a wait until morning problem.

In a House in The Cove or the Older Neighborhoods

The single-family streets in The Cove, around the historic downtown and along the canals were built out largely in the 1950s and 1960s, and their emergencies follow the age of the wiring and the nearness of salt water.

The panel is buzzing, warm, or smells hot

A humming, crackling or ticking sound from a panel is an arc, and it is often accompanied by heat you can feel through the cover. In houses of this vintage the causes are a breaker that no longer seats tightly on the bus, a corroded bus bar, or a neutral or ground bar connection that has worked loose. Plenty of Cove houses still run Federal Pacific Stab-Lok or Zinsco panels, and both brands are known for this exact failure, along with breakers that hold closed on a fault. If your panel is buzzing, throw the main only when it is cool, dry, and directly in front of you. Otherwise keep your hands off and we will kill power at the meter. Do not remove the cover.

The outlets on one wall are dead

A dead group of outlets with nothing tripped at the panel is, more often than not, a failed connection at a back-stabbed receptacle somewhere upstream on the circuit, or a tripped ground fault device in a bathroom, garage or outdoor location that feeds them. Check every GFCI in the house and press reset. If that does not restore them, leave the circuit alone and we will find the open point. If the dead outlets are also warm or smell, turn the breaker off.

The dock, lift or pool tripped and will not reset

Canal-front houses in The Cove carry docks, lifts and pool equipment on circuits that live in wet ground and salt air. A ground fault device that trips and will not hold on a dock circuit is usually reporting real leakage, whether from a flooded junction box, a corroded receptacle, or a fault aboard a boat plugged into shore power. On a dock that leakage can put current into the water around a swimmer. If anyone feels a tingle in the canal, they get out, moving away from the dock, and the dock stays off. A boat lift stalled with a hull in the air is typically a contactor, a limit switch or a lost leg on the feed, and we can generally get it down safely the same night. Pool pumps that trip the breaker on start usually have a failing motor or a wet connection at the equipment pad, and a pool that has lost its bonding is a shock hazard that gets the equipment shut off until it is corrected.

The meter can has rusted through

East of Federal Highway, meter enclosures and outdoor disconnects corrode from the bottom up until rain gets in. The end result is a socket that arcs, a lost neutral, or a burned main lug. When that happens the house is dark until the enclosure and terminations are replaced and the utility reconnects, and we sequence that work with the city and FPL. If your meter can is visibly perforated or the disconnect screws have seized, that is a daytime job worth doing before it becomes a night one, and it is covered on our Deerfield Beach electrician near me page.

In a Warehouse or Flex Bay West of I-95

The industrial parks off Powerline Road, along Green Road and SW 10th Street, and around Newport Center run three-phase services, and the emergencies there look nothing like a house.

A lost phase

When one of the three legs goes missing, the 120 volt loads on the other two mostly carry on, so the office lights stay on and the receptacles work. Three-phase motors do not. Compressors, exhaust fans, conveyors, pumps and rooftop units try to run on two legs, hum loudly, overheat, and burn their windings if nobody shuts them down. If part of a building has power and the motors sound wrong, stop the motors first, then call. Behind it is either a utility fuse gone at the transformer, one pole of the main failed, or a lug on one phase burned open at the service, and the first measurement at the switchgear tells us which.

A tripped tenant main

Multi-tenant flex buildings have a house panel and a panel per suite, and a suite going dark while the neighbors are fine is usually the suite's main breaker or its feeder from the meter bank. Years of tenants adding machines to a panel that was never rebuilt for them is the usual background. If the main resets and holds, note what was running when it tripped. If it will not reset, it stays off and the suite waits for a replacement.

Burning smell near a machine or a panel

Shut the machine down at its disconnect, and if the smell is at a panel, shut off the feeder to that panel if you can identify it. Do not open the panel. Motor circuits carry their own overload protection, and a burning smell at a starter or a disconnect often means the overload relay has been bypassed or the contacts have welded. We do not restore a machine circuit without finding out why it failed.

Exit and emergency lighting that has gone dark

A building can lose the circuit feeding its exit signs and emergency heads without losing anything else, and that is a life safety problem during working hours rather than an inconvenience. Battery-backed units that do not light on a power loss are the same problem in a different form. We treat those as after-hours work when a business has to open in the morning, and the wider scope of that side of the business is under emergency electrical repairs.

The Neighbors Have Power and You Do Not

This is the most common call we take in Deerfield Beach and it is worth its own explanation, because the answer decides who you should be phoning.

FPL's property ends at your weatherhead, plus the meter that plugs into your socket. The customer's property is the weatherhead, the mast, the cable coming down to the meter, the meter socket and can, and every wire past it. A house that is dark with a blank meter display and an intact drop usually has an open connection on the utility side, and the utility has to fix it. A house that is dark with a lit meter has lost its main, its service conductors, or a connection in the enclosure, and that is our work. A drop that is down, a mast that has been pulled away from the wall, or a weatherhead hanging by its conductors is a shared problem: we repair the customer-owned equipment, the city inspects, and FPL reconnects, in that order.

If you are not sure, call us anyway. A few questions on the phone usually sort it out, and if the answer is FPL we will tell you that rather than send a truck you do not need.

Breakers That Trip and the Difference Between Annoying and Dangerous

A breaker that trips is protecting something. The question is what.

Overloads trip after the circuit has been carrying too much for a while: a space heater on the same bedroom circuit as a window unit, or a warehouse bench with three tools on one 20 amp receptacle string. The breaker resets and holds once the load comes off. That is a design problem to fix in daylight, not an emergency.

Short circuits and ground faults trip the breaker instantly and it will not hold no matter what is unplugged. That is a conductor touching something it should not, whether a damaged cable, a failed appliance, a flooded box or a chewed wire, and every push of the handle sends fault current back into the damage. Leave it off and call.

GFCI and AFCI devices that trip repeatedly are usually reporting a real condition, and on a coastal property that condition is most often water or a failing motor. The wrong fix is to replace them with a standard breaker or receptacle so the tripping stops. The right fix is to find the leakage.

A main breaker that trips or will not reset takes the whole building down until it is replaced, and that job involves the utility pulling the meter. Mains fail from age and heat, and a main that feels soft in the handle or is warm to the touch is on its way out.

Hurricane Season on Both Sides of the Interstate

Storm work in Deerfield Beach has an east side and a west side. On the barrier island and in The Cove it is storm surge, king tides and salt spray: panels in garages that took water, dock pedestals that went under, meter cans on the east wall of a building that took the brunt of the wind. West of I-95 it is wind damage to rooftop equipment, service masts torn off tilt-wall buildings, flooded loading docks, and generators.

Ahead of a storm, know where your main is and whether it can be reached without standing in water. If water starts to come in and the panel is still dry, turn off the main. If it is not dry, do not. Shut the thermostat off while the grid is flickering, because repeated grid faults and reclosures are hard on compressors.

Afterward, anything that was submerged gets replaced rather than dried and reused, because breakers, receptacles and switches corrode from the inside after flooding and may carry load fine while losing their ability to trip. We document flooded equipment for insurance and replace it with the service disconnected.

Portable generators cause a predictable share of post-storm emergencies. A generator connected to a dryer receptacle with a double male cord backfeeds the transformer and energizes the utility line, which can kill a lineman working on it and can do the same to anyone who touches a line on the ground. With no inlet or transfer switch, the generator feeds appliances through cords and feeds nothing else, and it stays outdoors away from any opening, and let us install a proper inlet or transfer switch when the weather clears. See generator installation for that side of it. A standby unit that stayed silent through an outage is also something we come out for, and most often it is the battery or the transfer controls.

Before We Arrive: What Helps and What Hurts

What helps: knowing where the panel, the meter and any sub-panels or disconnects are, and clearing the way to them. Having the story straight, meaning what happened, when, what was running, and whether it was raining. Checking whether the neighbors have power. Turning off the one breaker you can trace a smell or a spark to. Unplugging electronics if the lights are dimming and brightening. In a condo, having management's after-hours number ready so we can get into the meter room. In a warehouse, having someone on site who can open the electrical room and knows which disconnect feeds what.

What hurts: taking the cover off a panel, resetting a breaker more than once, taping or wedging a breaker on, touching a wet or sparking meter can, going near a downed drop, running a generator into a wall receptacle, or lighting candles in a building that smells like hot insulation.

When the electrician arrives, the sequence is the same in a tower, a ranch house or a flex bay: prove the building safe, take readings at the service, narrow the fault down, isolate it, and bring back what can come back. If the fault reveals a panel or a service that is finished, we secure it that night, write up the permanent repair, and quote it after seeing it, never over the phone. The electrical panel repair page describes what that permanent work typically involves.

Areas We Cover in Deerfield Beach

A Deerfield Beach emergency electrician has to cover a city that runs from the Atlantic to the industrial parks in about five miles, and we work all of it at any hour. On the east side that means the barrier island from the Hillsboro Inlet north past the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier to the Boca Raton line, the condominiums along A1A and the Intracoastal, The Cove and the canal streets around the Cove Shopping Center, the area around Sullivan Park and Pioneer Park on the Intracoastal and the Hillsboro Canal, and the historic downtown around Hillsboro Boulevard, Federal Highway and Dixie Highway.

West of the railroad and the interstate it means Century Village, Crystal Lake, the neighborhoods off Military Trail, the streets bordering Quiet Waters Park, and the Arboretum area, and the flex and industrial parks off Powerline Road and Green Road, along SW 10th Street, and around Newport Center Drive.

Deerfield Beach is the northern edge of Broward County, so a call here often follows one in Pompano Beach or Lighthouse Point, or one over the county line in Boca Raton. Everywhere else we go is listed on our service area page.

Talk to an Electrician in Deerfield Beach

Dead unit, buzzing panel, dark dock, humming compressor, flooded garage, or a house that is the only one on the street with no lights: call a Deerfield Beach emergency electrician at (954) 602-0050. Describe what you see, hear and smell, and we will say whether it can wait for morning or whether a truck should be moving now.

There is one number and it is (954) 602-0050. It reaches a person at three in the morning and it reaches the same people at three in the afternoon for the work that does not have to happen tonight.