Power Outage Response

Power outage response covers the situation where a home or building has lost some or all of its electricity and it is not clear why. We take these calls day and night across Broward County, the northeast Miami-Dade communities we serve, and Boca Raton and Delray Beach, and the majority of them fall into a handful of recognizable patterns.

The first thing worth saying is that a total blackout is often the easier problem. When everything is dead, the cause is usually upstream and identifiable. It is the partial outage, half a house working and half not, lights that brighten and dim, a breaker that will not stay in, that tends to be the expensive one, because the same conditions that produce those symptoms also destroy equipment while you are trying to figure it out.

Is the power out, or is your power out

Before anything else, establish whether the utility is delivering electricity to the property. This determines who fixes it and whether waiting is a reasonable strategy.

Signs it is the utility's side:

• Neighbors on the same street are also dark, particularly houses fed from the same transformer
• Streetlights on your block are out
• The utility's outage map shows an event covering your address
• The outage started at the same moment as a storm, a bang, or a visible flash outside
• There is a downed line or a tree in the conductors anywhere near the property

Signs it is on your side of the meter:

• Neighbors have power and you do not
• Part of the building works and part does not
• Lights are dim, or unusually bright, rather than off
• The outage began with a smell, a sound, or after specific equipment turned on
• Power comes and goes when nothing outside has changed
• Something at the meter or the mast is visibly damaged, burned or hanging loose

The dividing line runs at the point where the utility's conductors terminate at your equipment. Everything from there into the building is yours, including in most cases the mast, the riser, the weatherhead, the meter enclosure and the service entrance conductors. A utility crew that finds the failure on your side will disconnect for safety and leave, and you will need an electrician before they will come back and reconnect. If a crew has already tagged the property or told you to get an electrician, say that when you call us, because it changes what we bring and how we sequence the work.

If a conductor is down on the ground, on a fence, on a vehicle or in standing water, stay away from it and away from anything metal touching it, and report it to the utility. That is not an electrician call. Water on the ground conducts, and the hazard extends well beyond the visible wire.

Half the building is dark

This is the most common partial outage call and it has a specific meaning. A standard residential service in this area is single phase, 120/240 volts, delivered as two energized legs and a neutral. Every 240 volt appliance uses both legs. Every 120 volt circuit uses one leg and the neutral, and the panel alternates legs down the bus so the load spreads evenly.

When one leg is lost, roughly half the 120 volt circuits go dead and every 240 volt appliance stops or behaves strangely. The air conditioning will not start. The range works partially or not at all. Half the lights are fine and half are gone, in a scattered pattern that follows the panel rather than the floor plan.

The causes, roughly in order of how often we find them:

• A failed main breaker pole. One side of a two-pole main can fail internally while the other continues to carry current.
• A loose or burned main lug. The termination heats over years, oxidizes, and eventually opens.
• A corroded connection in the meter enclosure. Extremely common near the coast, where salt air gets into the can and works on the jaws and terminations.
• A failed utility fuse or a damaged conductor on the drop. This one is theirs, but it presents identically from inside the house.
• Damage in the riser or at the weatherhead after a storm, a tree contact, or a truck hitting the mast.

A single dead 120 volt circuit is a different and much smaller problem, usually a tripped breaker, a failed device, or a bad connection in one box. When it is exactly half the house, look at the service.

The lost neutral, and why it destroys appliances

This is the failure that costs people the most money and it is the one homeowners most often misread as a utility problem they should wait out. Do not wait it out.

The neutral is the reference point that keeps each of your two legs at 120 volts. When the neutral connection opens, whether at the meter, at the main lug, at the transformer or on the drop, the two legs are no longer independently referenced. They end up effectively in series across the full 240 volts, and that 240 divides between them according to how much load is on each side. The lightly loaded half of the house rises toward 200 volts or more. The heavily loaded half drops toward 40 or 50.

What that looks like in a home:

• Lights in one part of the house are extremely bright, sometimes visibly white, while lights elsewhere are dim and orange
• Brightness shifts every time a large appliance cycles on or off
• Bulbs fail repeatedly in the same rooms
• Electronics, televisions, computers, appliance control boards and LED drivers fail in groups over a short period
• Motors hum, run slowly, or stall and overheat
• You may feel a tingle on plumbing fixtures or metal appliance cases

No breaker protects against this. Overvoltage is not overcurrent, so nothing trips. Everything on the high side is being destroyed in real time, and the longer it runs the larger the appliance replacement bill gets. A house left in this condition for a weekend can lose the refrigerator, the range control board, the air handler board, the television and every LED fixture in the affected half.

There is a second hazard. With the intended neutral path open, return current looks for another route back to the source, and that route is often the grounding system: the water piping, the ground rod, the equipment grounding conductors. Metal parts that should be at zero volts are not, and the tingle people feel on a faucet is exactly that.

If your lights are behaving this way, shut off the main breaker if you can reach it safely from outside the panel cover, and call us. Turning off the main stops the damage. Call (954) 602-0050 and describe what the lights are doing, because a lost neutral moves to the front of the schedule.

A main breaker that will not reset

Breakers are mechanical devices and they do fail, but before assuming that, understand what a reset actually requires. A tripped breaker handle usually sits between on and off, and it has to be pushed firmly all the way to off before it will go back to on. A large fraction of the calls that begin with "the breaker will not reset" end with a handle that was never fully cycled.

If the main goes back on and immediately trips again, that is a fault somewhere in the building drawing enough current to operate the breaker instantly. Turning every branch breaker off and then attempting the main again is a reasonable thing to do with the panel cover in place, and if the main holds with all branches off, the fault is on one of the branch circuits and can be found by restoring them one at a time. If the main will not hold with every branch breaker off, the problem is in the panel itself or in the service conductors, and that is not a homeowner situation under any circumstances.

Repeated resetting of a breaker that is tripping on a real fault is a bad idea. Each operation puts the contacts through the fault current again, degrades them, and can weld them. A breaker that has been cycled onto a short a dozen times may stop protecting anything, which turns a nuisance into a fire risk. If it will not hold after one honest attempt, stop.

Other reasons a main will not reset include an internal failure of the breaker, a failed bus connection behind it, moisture inside the enclosure, and on older equipment simple age. Panels of certain vintages have a documented history of breakers that fail to trip when they should and fail to reset when they should, and if that is what is in your house it is a replacement conversation rather than a repair, which we cover on our panel hazards page.

Smell, sound and heat at the panel

Certain symptoms mean the panel is failing right now rather than at some point in the future. Treat these as immediate:

• A burning smell. Overheated wire insulation and the plastics used in breakers and devices produce a sharp, acrid, faintly chemical odor that people describe as fishy or like hot plastic. It does not resemble anything else in a house.
• Buzzing, sizzling or crackling from inside the enclosure.
• A cover or a breaker handle that is warm to the touch.
• Visible scorching, soot or discoloration at the edge of the dead front or around a breaker.
• Lights flickering across the whole building in time with nothing in particular.

Shut the main off if you can do it safely from the outside of the panel, get people away from the area, and call. Do not open the cover, do not spray anything at it, and do not put a fan on it. If there is visible fire or smoke, call the fire department first.

What we do when we arrive, in order

There is a sequence to this work and skipping steps is how people get hurt and how the real cause gets missed.

First, verify what is present. We measure voltage at the service: leg to leg, each leg to neutral, and each leg to ground. Those readings alone identify a lost leg, a lost neutral or a normal service faster than any amount of discussion.

Second, establish the boundary. If the numbers say the problem is upstream of your equipment, we document it and tell you to call the utility, and we do not charge you to replace parts that are not broken.

Third, work from the service inward. Weatherhead and riser, meter enclosure, main disconnect, main lugs, bus, then subpanels, then branch circuits. Problems near the source produce symptoms everywhere, so chasing a flickering light in a bedroom before checking the service wastes everyone's time.

Fourth, thermal and load readings. An infrared scan of the open panel under whatever load remains, and clamp meter readings on the service conductors and on suspect circuits. A connection that is failing shows up as heat and as an imbalance.

Fifth, isolate and restore. Where a fault is on a branch circuit, we isolate that circuit and restore everything else, so the building is usable while the specific problem is repaired.

Sixth, tell you what it will take. Before we start replacing equipment, you get a description of what failed, what it takes to correct it, and whether it needs a permit and an inspection. On service equipment work it usually does, and there is a utility disconnect and reconnect involved, which we coordinate.

Getting you running while a part is on order

Not every failure can be repaired on the visit. Meter enclosures, older panels, specific breakers, main disconnects and current transformer cabinets are not all stocked, and some equipment for discontinued panels is genuinely hard to source. When that happens the question becomes what we can safely restore in the meantime.

Options, depending on the situation:

• Restore the healthy portion. If one leg or one section of a panel is compromised, moving critical circuits to functioning positions can bring back refrigeration, lighting and one air conditioning zone.
• A temporary panel or temporary service. On a failed service entrance, a temporary arrangement approved by the jurisdiction and the utility can keep a property occupied while permanent equipment is built and inspected.
• Generator connection. A properly connected portable or towable unit through a transfer means, feeding selected circuits.
• Temporary distribution for a business. Cord and cable assemblies with proper protection feeding refrigeration, point of sale and life safety equipment.

One thing we will not do, and that you should not let anyone do, is connect a generator by backfeeding a receptacle with a cord that has male plugs on both ends. That arrangement energizes the exposed pins on the cord, energizes the house wiring with no isolation from the utility, and can push voltage back through the transformer onto the lines outside where crews are working. People are killed by this every storm season. A generator that is going to feed a building needs an interlock or a transfer switch, which is covered under generator installation.

Commercial buildings: deciding what comes back first

In a business, an outage is a revenue problem with a clock on it, and the technical work has to run alongside a triage decision about what matters most.

We ask the operator to rank their loads before we start restoring anything, because the answer is different for every building. A restaurant almost always says walk-in coolers and freezers first, then the hood and make-up air, then the line, then the dining room. A medical office says refrigerated medication and the server. A warehouse says the fire pump, the alarm system and enough lighting to work safely. A retail store says point of sale and the security system.

Life safety systems have their own status regardless of what an operator ranks. Fire alarm, exit and emergency lighting, elevator recall and smoke control are not optional and are frequently the reason a building cannot legally be occupied during a partial outage. If those are down, that becomes the first restoration priority whether or not it generates revenue.

Larger properties on three phase service have failure modes that residential buildings do not, including the loss of a single phase, which lets three phase motors continue to run in a condition that overheats and destroys them within minutes. Motor loads should come off before anything is re-energized on a suspected phase loss. We cover this equipment under three phase power, and multi-tenant and managed properties under property management services.

What to shut off while you wait

While you are waiting for a utility crew or for us, a few decisions reduce what the restoration costs you.

• Turn off air conditioning at the thermostat and at the breaker. Compressors are the most expensive thing in the building to lose, and they are the most vulnerable to low voltage and to the surge that arrives when power comes back.
• Unplug electronics and anything with a control board. Televisions, computers, routers, garage door openers, appliance boards. If the outage involved a voltage abnormality, these are what dies.
• Turn off electric water heaters and the pool pump at the breaker.
• Leave one light switched on. It tells you the moment power returns without you having to wander the house.
• Leave the refrigerator closed. A full unit holds temperature far longer than people assume, and opening it repeatedly is what ruins the contents.
• Do not run a generator in a garage, on a porch, or anywhere near a window or an air intake. Carbon monoxide from portable generators kills people every hurricane season in this state, and it does it without warning.

If the outage followed a storm, our storm preparation guide covers what to do before the next one, and whole building surge protection is worth a conversation once the power is back, because the surge on restoration damages more equipment than the outage itself.

After the power comes back

Restoration is not always the end of it. Bring things back gradually rather than all at once: air conditioning last, after lighting and refrigeration have settled. If anything smells hot, buzzes, or does not come back at all, do not keep resetting it.

Where the outage involved a voltage abnormality, damage is often delayed. Compressors and control boards that survived the event fail days or weeks later, and by then most people have stopped connecting it to the outage. If you had a lost neutral or a surge event, a follow-up inspection of the panel and terminations is worth doing, and it also produces the documentation you need if you are filing anything with a carrier.

Call, do not text

A partial outage, a burning smell, a hot panel or lights that are behaving strangely is a phone call. We answer the phone around the clock and we dispatch the closest available electrician, and a voice conversation lets us ask the three or four questions that determine how urgent your situation actually is and what to shut off before we get there. Those questions cannot be asked usefully over a form or a message thread.

Call (954) 602-0050. Have ready: what is working and what is not, whether the neighbors have power, whether anything smells or sounds wrong, the panel brand if you can read it from the label, and whether the utility has already been out. Non-urgent follow-up work can go through our contact page, and if you want to understand the broader emergency work we handle, that is on our emergency electrical repairs page.