Emergency Electrician in Hollywood, FL

Something in your house just went wrong with the electricity and you need to know what to do in the next five minutes, not next week. That is what this page is for. 24/7 Electrician is headquartered at 1315 N 47th Ave in Hollywood, which means the emergency electrician in Hollywood you reach at (954) 602-0050 is coming from inside the city, not from across the county. We answer the phone around the clock, we dispatch the closest available electrician, and while you wait we will tell you exactly what to shut off and whether you should still be standing in the building.

Read the section that matches what you are seeing. If you are not sure which one that is, call and describe it. A burning smell you cannot place is a reason to call, not a reason to wait and see.

Why the Truck Starts in Hollywood

An after-hours electrical call is different from a scheduled one in a way that has nothing to do with the wiring. It is about who shows up, how well they know the building type they are walking into, and whether they arrived with the parts that a house of that age is likely to need. Our shop sits between Sheridan Street and Hollywood Boulevard on the west side of the city, in the middle of the 1950s and 1960s ranch neighborhoods, a few minutes from the Lakes and from the beach.

That location shapes what is on the truck. We carry the breakers that fit the panels actually installed in Hollywood homes, including the obsolete brands, along with meter socket jaws, service entrance cable, weatherhead fittings, GFCI devices, and enough conduit and wire to build a temporary safe feed if a permanent repair has to wait for the utility or for daylight. An emergency electrician in Hollywood who has to leave to get parts is not an emergency electrician.

Hollywood has also taught us about its own failure patterns. The oldest houses in the Lakes and around the Hollywood Boulevard historic district fail at their insulation and their splices. The postwar block houses fail at their panels. The beach side fails at anything metal that has been sitting in salt air. We will get into all three, because knowing which one you are dealing with changes the first thing we do when we arrive.

The Calls We Take Most Often After Dark

Every emergency looks unique from inside the house. From the truck they sort into a handful of patterns. Here are the ones that come up most in Hollywood, what each usually means, and what we want you to do first.

Everything Went Dark at Once

Step outside and look at the neighbors. If the whole street is dark, the utility has a problem and your first call is to Florida Power and Light, either through their outage line or their online outage map, to report it. There is nothing an electrician can do about a substation or a downed feeder on Federal Highway, and we will tell you that honestly rather than sell you a visit.

If the neighbors have power and you do not, the problem is between the pole and your panel. Look at the main breaker. If it is in the tripped position, which on most panels is a middle position between on and off, push it fully off and then back on once. If it holds, watch it. If it trips again immediately, or if it will not move, leave it alone and call us. A main that trips instantly is protecting the house from a fault it cannot clear, and forcing it repeatedly is how a fault becomes a fire.

If the main is on and the house is still dead, the failure is upstream of the panel: the meter, the service entrance conductors, the weatherhead, or the drop from the pole. That is the territory where the utility and the electrician meet, and we cover how that line works further down.

Half the House Is Dead, or the Lights Are Wrong

This one deserves attention because it looks minor and is not. Residential service in Hollywood is 120/240 volts split across two hot legs. If one leg is lost at the meter, at the main, or on the utility side, roughly half the circuits go dark while the other half keep working. That is inconvenient but it is not the dangerous version.

The dangerous version is a lost or loose neutral. When the neutral connection fails, the two halves of the house are no longer held at 120 volts each. Instead the voltage divides according to what is plugged in, so one side of the house may see 90 volts and the other 150. The signs are specific: some lights unusually bright while others are dim, bulbs burning out, a television or refrigerator making a noise it never made before, or a light that changes brightness when a different appliance turns on. That is a lost neutral until proven otherwise, and it can destroy every electronic device in the house in minutes.

Turn off the main breaker if you can reach it safely. Unplug what you care about. Then call. A lost neutral is often on the utility side, at the connection on the pole or at the weatherhead, but it can just as easily be a corroded lug in your meter can or main panel, and the only way to know is to test at both points.

A Burning Smell Without a Visible Source

Overheated wiring insulation has a smell that most people describe as fishy, or like a hot electric motor, or like burning plastic. Overheated bakelite in an old breaker or receptacle smells acrid and sharp. If you smell either and cannot find the source, the source is usually inside a wall, a ceiling box, or the panel.

Walk the house and feel switch plates and outlet covers with the back of your hand. A warm cover plate marks the spot. Feel the panel cover the same way. If any of them are hot, or if you see discoloration around a device, turn off the breaker for that circuit if you can identify it, and if you cannot, turn off the main. Then call us and stay near an exit. If you see smoke or flame, leave the house and call emergency services before you call anyone else. Hollywood Fire Rescue would far rather come to a smell that turned out to be nothing than to a fire that started as a smell someone decided to sleep on.

A Breaker That Will Not Stay On

There is a difference between a breaker that trips once a week when the microwave and toaster run together, which is an overload and a daytime job, and a breaker that trips the instant you reset it, which is a short circuit or a ground fault and is not going to fix itself. A breaker that trips instantly with nothing plugged in on the circuit means the fault is in the wiring or in a hardwired device: a water heater element that has failed to ground, a ceiling fan that has taken on water from a roof leak, a cable that a screw or a nail finally reached, or in the older houses, insulation that has crumbled off the conductors inside a box.

Leave the breaker off. Do not swap it for a larger one and do not tape it on. If the circuit that will not reset feeds something you need tonight, such as the refrigerator or a medical device, tell us that when you call and we will prioritize getting a safe temporary feed to it.

Sparks, Buzzing, or a Crackle From the Panel

A panel should be silent. A faint 60 cycle hum from a large breaker under heavy load is normal. Buzzing that comes and goes, a crackling or sizzling sound, or a smell from the panel are not. Those are the sounds of an arc, and an arc inside a panel is either a loose connection heating up or a breaker that has lost its grip on the bus.

Sparking at an outlet when you plug something in is similar. A single small blue spark as a plug makes contact is normal for some appliances. Repeated sparking, a spark with a pop, scorch marks on the face of the receptacle, or a plug that comes out warm means the contacts inside the receptacle have loosened and are arcing. Stop using that outlet and turn off its breaker.

What to Do Before We Get There

You can do a great deal in the time between hanging up and hearing the truck. None of it requires tools and all of it makes the house safer.

• Know where your panel is and how to reach it. In a lot of Hollywood houses it is in the garage, a utility closet, or on an exterior wall. Clear a path to it and put a flashlight next to it. If the power is out, that flashlight is the only light you will have.
• If you smell burning, turn off the main. You lose the lights but you remove the energy from whatever is heating up. That trade is always worth making.
• Unplug sensitive equipment if you suspect a voltage problem. Computers, televisions, the refrigerator and freezer, anything with a control board. Voltage that is wrong is worse for equipment than no voltage at all.
• Do not reset a breaker more than once. One reset tells you whether it was a transient. A second and third reset only adds heat to a fault.
• Do not touch anything wet. If water is on the floor near the panel, near an outlet, or near an appliance, stay out of it. Water and a failed ground are how people get hurt in these situations.
• Do not use a generator indoors or in the garage, even with the door open. And do not plug a generator into a wall outlet or the dryer receptacle to feed the house. That energizes the utility lines outside and can kill a line worker.
• Keep the phone free. We may call back with a question while the electrician is en route.

If you are in a condo or an apartment and the problem seems to be in a shared space like a meter room or a corridor, call the building manager or the association's after-hours number too. In shared buildings we usually need someone with keys to the electrical room, and getting that person moving early saves everyone time.

Utility Problem or Electrician Problem

This is the question we get asked more than any other on an emergency call, so here is the plain version. Florida Power and Light owns and maintains the lines on the poles, the service drop that runs from the pole to your house, and the meter itself. The homeowner owns the service mast or riser, the weatherhead where the utility drop connects to your conductors, the service entrance cable running down into the meter can, the meter can and its socket, and everything from there into the house. If a storm rips the mast off your wall, the utility will not reconnect the drop until that mast and weatherhead are repaired, and that repair is our job.

A practical way to sort it:

• Call the utility first when the whole neighborhood is out, when a line is down on the ground or hanging low, when a transformer on a pole is smoking or made a loud bang, or when a tree is on the lines.
• Call us first when the neighbors have power and you do not, when the main breaker will not hold, when anything smells hot, when half the house is dead, when the meter can or the mast is damaged, or when the utility has told you the problem is on your side.
• Call both when a storm has damaged the service entrance. We repair the customer side, the utility reconnects and reseals the meter, and the two have to happen in that order.

One more thing. If your power came back on after an outage and something is now wrong that was not wrong before, such as flickering, a hum from an appliance, or a breaker that trips, do not assume it will settle down. Restoration surges and the voltage swings during re-energization are hard on equipment and on weak connections, and they surface faults that were waiting to happen.

When You Should Not Stay in the House

Most electrical emergencies do not require leaving. Some do, and we would rather say it plainly than have you second-guess it at midnight.

Leave, and call emergency services from outside, if you see flames or smoke from a wall, ceiling, outlet, or panel. Leave if a burning smell is getting stronger after you have turned off the main, because that means something is still hot enough to keep smoldering. Leave if you hear popping or crackling inside a wall that continues after the power is off. Leave if a downed line is touching the house or anything metal attached to it, such as a fence, a gutter, or a screen enclosure, and do not touch those things on your way out. Leave if there is standing water in the house and you cannot get to the main to shut it off without walking through the water.

Once you are out, do not go back in for belongings. We can meet you outside and we will not enter a building the fire department has not cleared. Everything else, including a house with no power on a hot night, is uncomfortable rather than dangerous, and we will get you sorted from the driveway.

Hurricanes, Storms, and What They Do to Hollywood Houses

Hollywood has been hit hard before. The 1926 hurricane leveled much of the young city, and Hurricane Irma in 2017 caused widespread damage and outages across town. Broward County sits inside Florida's High Velocity Hurricane Zone, and every season brings at least a few nights when the calls come in faster than we can log them. After a storm, emergency electrical work in Hollywood has a specific shape.

Torn Service Drops and Bent Masts

The weakest point on most older Hollywood houses is the service mast. In the 1950s and 1960s neighborhoods west of I-95 and along Johnson and Taft, the mast is often a length of rigid conduit through the roof or up the wall, with the utility drop pulling on it from the pole. High wind, a falling branch, or a neighbor's debris puts a side load on that mast that it was never designed for. It bends, the weatherhead pulls off, the service entrance cable is exposed to rain, and sometimes the whole assembly tears away from the wall taking a piece of the eave with it.

If you see this, do not go near the conductors, even if the neighborhood is dark. Lines come back on without warning. Call the utility to report the drop, and call us to rebuild the mast, the weatherhead, and the service entrance conductors so the utility can reconnect. Repairs of this kind need a permit and an inspection before the meter can be reset, and we handle that paperwork as part of the job because nobody wants to learn it the hard way while the refrigerator warms up.

Water in the Panel

Storm water gets into panels three ways in Hollywood: down through a damaged mast or weatherhead, through an exterior panel whose gasket failed years ago, and from below when the ground floor floods. On the barrier island, in the Lakes, and on the streets closest to the Intracoastal, that last one is the one that matters most, because the water that comes up is salt water and salt water does not dry out and go away.

Here is what we do with a flooded panel and what we will not do. Breakers that have been submerged are replaced, not dried out, because the internal mechanism and the trip calibration are compromised by water and by the sediment it carries. A panel whose bus bars have been under water is replaced. Receptacles and switches that were submerged are replaced. Nonmetallic sheathed cable that was submerged is generally replaced back to a point above the water line, because the paper filler inside the jacket wicks water and the conductors corrode from the inside. GFCI and AFCI devices that got wet are replaced. Surge protective devices that got wet are replaced. That sounds like a lot because it is, but restoring power to a salt-soaked panel by wiping it down and closing the door is how houses burn in the weeks after a storm when everyone thinks the danger has passed.

What we can often do the same night is isolate the damaged section and build a safe temporary feed to the circuits you need, such as refrigeration, a few lights, and a fan, while the permanent replacement is scheduled. That work is described more on our emergency electrical repairs page.

Generators That Failed When They Were Needed

Many Hollywood households have a portable generator and a few have a standby unit. Both fail in predictable ways on the night they are needed: the transfer switch does not transfer, the generator starts but the house stays dark, the generator runs but trips its own breaker as soon as the air conditioner starts, or a portable is running off extension cords through a window with the house main still on. We take those calls. We can diagnose a transfer switch that has stuck, correct an interlock that was installed wrong, and sort out which loads the unit can actually carry. We will not connect a generator to the house through a dryer outlet or a double-ended cord, and if we find one set up that way we will disconnect it and explain why, because a backfed line is a lethal hazard to the utility crews working on Dixie Highway that same night.

Three Failure Patterns, Three Parts of the City

Old Wiring in the Lakes and the Boom-Era Houses

The houses around North Lake, South Lake, and West Lake, and the boom-era blocks near Young Circle and the Hollywood Boulevard historic business district, produce a kind of emergency call that the newer neighborhoods do not. The wiring in those homes is old enough that the insulation is the weak point. Rubber and cloth insulation that has spent ninety years in a South Florida attic is brittle, and it fails at the places where it has been disturbed: inside fixture boxes, at splices, behind switches that have been replaced three times.

The call usually comes in one of two ways. Either a ceiling light flickered for months and then went out with a pop and a smell, or a breaker that never tripped in twenty years suddenly trips and will not reset. What we find behind the fixture is a splice with the insulation gone, conductors touching a metal box, or a bare wire resting on the fixture canopy. The repair on the night is to make that box safe and get the circuit back up if it can be done safely. The conversation the next morning is about how many other boxes in the house look the same, and that conversation lives on our Hollywood electrician page rather than here.

Two things we ask homeowners of these houses not to do. Do not use an outlet or a fixture that has just failed, even if it seems to be working again. And do not have a handyman replace the failed fixture without opening the box and looking at the conductors feeding it, because the fixture was never the problem.

Panel Failures in the Postwar Block Neighborhoods

Hollywood Hills, Boulevard Heights, Beverly Park, and the blocks west toward State Road 7 were built in the decades when Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco panels were sold by the thousands across South Florida, and plenty are still on the wall. Our emergency calls from those panels have a signature. The breaker did not trip when it should have, so the first sign of an overload or a fault was heat, smell, or a melted receptacle somewhere in the house instead of a tripped breaker in the garage. Or a breaker did trip and now will not reset, because the connection between the breaker and the bus has arced and pitted the bus.

On the night, our options depend on what we find. If the bus is intact and a single breaker has failed, we can sometimes replace that breaker and restore the circuit. If the bus is damaged, replacing a breaker is pointless because the new one will not seat, and the panel has to be replaced. We can usually make the panel safe and restore essential circuits the same night, then replace the panel as a permitted job. We do not pretend a burned Stab-Lok bus can be cleaned up and put back in service. The details of that replacement work are on our electrical panel repair page.

Aluminum branch wiring from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s shows up in this same housing stock and produces the same kind of night call: a warm outlet cover, a scorched switch, a receptacle that stopped working and smells. The fault is nearly always at a termination where the aluminum loosened and heated. We repair that termination with the correct connector, check the others on the circuit, and tell you honestly whether the rest of the house needs the same attention.

Salt Air Failures on the Beach Side

East of the Intracoastal, along the Broadwalk and the streets behind it, and to a lesser extent through the Lakes, the emergency calls are about corrosion. The meter can that rusted through at the bottom and finally let water reach the lugs. The exterior disconnect for the air conditioner whose contacts corroded until they arced. The outdoor receptacle that has been damp for years and now trips the GFCI every time it rains. The beach condo unit whose balcony circuit shorted after salt spray got into a box that was never rated for a wet location.

The good news is that these faults are usually confined to the corroded component and are repairable the same night once we replace it with hardware rated for the exposure. The bad news is that corrosion is progressive, so if one lug has failed the ones next to it are close. Part of an emergency visit on the beach side is looking at what else is about to go, telling you, and letting you decide.

For beach condos, the emergency work stops at the unit panel. If the failure is in the meter room, the riser, or the building's switchgear, the association has to authorize it and usually has to open the room. We will still come, we will still diagnose, and we will work with the manager on the spot, but a unit owner cannot hire us to open the building's equipment.

After-Hours Commercial Calls Downtown and Along the Corridors

Hollywood Boulevard, Harrison Street, the Federal Highway and Dixie Highway corridors, and the retail strips west toward 441 are full of small businesses that cannot afford to be dark. The after-hours calls from those buildings sound like this: a restaurant kitchen lost power to the walk-in and the line at nine on a Friday. A storefront's lighting and sign went out and the meter is fine. Half the outlets in an office are dead and the panel is unlabeled. The exit signs and emergency lights in a building are out and there is an inspection in the morning.

We handle all of that with the same approach we use in a house: find the fault, isolate it, get the essential loads back, and tell the owner what has to be done properly and when. Restaurant work in particular is about the refrigeration circuits first and the ambiance second. For property managers who oversee several buildings across the city, we take the after-hours call and coordinate with whoever holds the keys. Our property management electrical page covers how we work with managers on an ongoing basis so the midnight call is not the first time we have seen the building.

What Happens When the Electrician Arrives

The first minutes are about safety, not repair. We confirm the main is off if you turned it off, or we turn it off ourselves if there is any sign of heat. We check for voltage where it should not be, on metal boxes, on the panel enclosure, on the water piping. Then we test at the meter and at the main to establish whether the incoming service is correct on both legs and whether the neutral is intact. That single test resolves about a third of the calls we get, because it tells us immediately whether the fault is on the utility side or ours.

From there we work toward the fault the way the symptoms point. We open the panel, look at every termination, and look for the discoloration, the melted insulation, or the pitted bus that marks the source. We isolate the affected circuit and split it if we have to, testing each section until we find the failed device, splice, or cable. When we find it, we make it safe first, and then we make it work if it can be made to work safely tonight. If it cannot, we say so, we build a temporary safe feed for what you need, and we schedule the permanent repair.

Before we leave you will know what failed, what we did about it, what is temporary and what is permanent, and what it will take to finish the job. Pricing on the permanent repair is quoted after we have seen the whole picture, not guessed at over the phone. If a permit is required for the permanent work, and for service entrance repairs and panel replacements in Hollywood it is, we pull it through the City of Hollywood Building Division and schedule the inspection.

Areas We Cover in Hollywood

Because we are based here, there is no part of Hollywood that is far for us. On the barrier island we take calls from Hollywood Beach and the condominium buildings along the Broadwalk, and from the streets between A1A and the Intracoastal. In the historic core we cover the Lakes around North Lake, South Lake, and West Lake, Downtown Hollywood and Young Circle, the Hollywood Boulevard historic business district, and the Hollywood Central, Beverly Hills, and South Central sections.

Our own neighborhood is Hollywood Hills, and from our address on N 47th Ave we cover Emerald Hills, Boulevard Heights, Beverly Park, and the streets along Sheridan Street, Johnson Street, Taft Street, Hollywood Boulevard, and Pembroke Road from the beach out past I-95 to State Road 7 and 441. The Dixie Highway and Federal Highway commercial corridors are on our regular route. Zip codes 33019, 33020, 33021, 33023, 33024, and 33025 all get the same service. Hollywood is the center of everywhere we go, and the rest of our coverage across Broward and into Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties is on our service area page.

Talk to an Electrician in Hollywood

If you are reading this with the lights off, a smell in the air, or a breaker in your hand that will not stay up, stop reading and call (954) 602-0050. Tell us what you see, what you smell, and what you have already turned off. We will tell you the next step before anyone gets in a truck.

The emergency electrician in Hollywood who answers that call lives and works in this city. We know the panels in Hollywood Hills, the wiring in the Lakes, and the meter cans on the beach, and we bring the parts for them. Day or night, (954) 602-0050 reaches a person, not a recording.