Emergency Electrician in Tamarac, FL

If the lights just went out in your Tamarac home, or you smell something hot near the panel, or a breaker keeps tripping and the house is getting warm, you are in the right place. We are 24/7 Electrician, an electrical contractor based in Hollywood, and we answer the phone around the clock for Tamarac. You can call (954) 602-0050 right now and a person will pick up, ask a few plain questions, and tell you what to do next. Nothing on this page requires you to know anything about electricity. Read the parts that match what you are seeing and skip the rest.

If what you have is not urgent at all, a panel you have been meaning to have looked at, an outlet you want added, a light that could be brighter, that belongs on our Tamarac electrician page, and there is no rush on any of it.

First, a Calm Way to Decide How Serious This Is

Most electrical problems that happen at night are not dangerous in the next five minutes. A few are. Here is how to tell the difference without touching anything.

Use your nose. A smell like burning plastic, hot rubber or fish, especially near the electrical panel, a wall, or a specific outlet, means something is overheating right now. Use your ears. A crackle, a sizzle, a pop, or a hum that is louder than usual and coming from the panel or from inside a wall means the same thing. Use the back of your hand, not your palm. Hold it near, not on, the panel cover, a switch plate or an outlet cover. Warmth you can feel from an inch away is a problem.

If you have any of those three, the next section is for you. If you have none of them, and the problem is simply that something stopped working, you have time to breathe and read on. We will get to you either way.

Smell, smoke, sound or heat: do this now

These are the steps, in the order to take them. You do not need to do them quickly, just in order.

• If you can see smoke or flame, or the smell is strong and getting stronger, leave the house. Take your phone, your medications if they are in reach, and anyone else who is home. Close the door behind you. Call 911 from outside, from a neighbor's driveway or the sidewalk. Do not go back in.
• If there is a smell but no smoke, and you know where your electrical panel is and can reach it comfortably, open the panel door and switch the largest breaker, usually at the top and marked MAIN, to the off position. That turns off the whole house. It is safe to do. The plastic switch handles are meant to be touched.
• If you cannot reach the panel, or you are not steady on your feet in the dark, do not try. Unplug whatever was on the outlet that smells, if it is easy, and move away from that spot.
• Never take the metal cover off the panel. There is nothing behind it you need to see.
• Then call us at (954) 602-0050. Tell us what you smelled or heard, where it was, and what you switched off. If you would rather have a son, a daughter, a neighbor or the association office make the call for you, that is fine, and we will talk to them.

One thing we ask everyone. If a breaker tripped and there was a smell or a noise with it, please do not turn it back on. The breaker did its job. Turning it back on gives whatever was heating up a second chance.

The Whole House Went Dark

This is the most common reason people call an emergency electrician in Tamarac, and usually the least worrying one. Two things to check.

Look out a window at your neighbors. If their houses are dark too, and the streetlights are out, the power company has an outage in the area. That is not something an electrician can fix. You can report it to Florida Power and Light, and they will restore it in their own time. Keep the refrigerator closed, put a flashlight where you can reach it, and if you rely on anything electrical for your health, read the section on medical equipment below.

If your neighbors have power and you do not, the problem is at your house. Go to the panel, if you can do so safely, and look at the main breaker. If it is sitting in the middle, or on the off side, push it firmly all the way to off and then back to on, one time. If the lights come back, fine. Make a note of what was running when it went out and give us a call in the morning so we can find out why a main breaker tripped, because they are not supposed to.

If the main will not stay on, or it was warm, or it made a noise, leave it off and call us. Do not keep trying. A main breaker that trips with nothing new running is usually a connection at the top of the panel that has become loose or corroded and is heating up, and that is something we need to see tonight rather than next week.

Only Some Things Stopped Working

One room, one wall, the bathroom outlets, the kitchen counter. This is a single circuit, and in a Tamarac villa or condo it is almost always one of two things.

The first is a tripped breaker in the panel. Look for one handle that is not lined up with the others. Push it all the way off, then on. If it holds, you are done for tonight. If it trips again right away, something on that circuit is faulty and it should stay off until we look at it. Unplug everything on that circuit, especially anything that was recently plugged in, a space heater, a new lamp, a vacuum cleaner.

The second is a GFCI outlet that has tripped. These are the outlets with two small buttons in the middle, usually in the bathroom, the kitchen, the garage or outside. One GFCI can control several ordinary outlets after it, so a dead outlet in the bedroom can be caused by a tripped GFCI in a bathroom on the other side of the wall. Press the button marked RESET on every GFCI you can find. If one will not reset, or it resets and then clicks off again, leave it and tell us which one.

If a circuit is dead and no breaker is tripped and no GFCI will reset, there is a broken connection somewhere on that circuit. In the older sections of Tamarac, the Mainlands, the Tamarac Lakes sections and parts of the Woodlands, that is often a connection at the back of an outlet that has loosened with age or, in houses of the early 1970s, an aluminum wire connection that has worked itself loose. It is not a fire in progress, but it does need to be found, and we would rather find it soon.

The Air Conditioner Is Off and the House Is Getting Warm

We treat this as urgent in Tamarac, and we want to say clearly why. Many of our customers here are past retirement age, some live alone, and heat in a closed house in July is dangerous for anyone over sixty-five in a way that it is not for a thirty-year-old. Heat exhaustion comes on quietly.

If the air conditioner stopped and the rest of the house has power, look at the panel for a tripped two-pole breaker, which is a wider breaker with two handles joined together, usually marked AC, A/C, or COND. Reset it once. If it holds and the system starts, good. If it trips again, leave it off. Do not keep resetting it. Something is drawing too much current, and each reset heats things up more.

While you wait: open windows if the night air is cooler than the house, run a fan on a circuit that still works, drink water, and stay in the coolest room. If you start to feel dizzy, sick to your stomach or confused, or if someone in the house does, that is a medical situation, and 911 is the right call before we are.

When we get there we find out whether the problem is the breaker, the wiring to the unit, the disconnect on the wall outside, or the air conditioner itself. If it is the machine, we will tell you honestly that you need an air conditioning contractor, and we will not charge you for a repair we did not make.

If You Depend on Electricity for Your Health

Oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, home dialysis equipment, powered lift chairs and hospital beds, refrigerated medications, electric mobility scooters on chargers. Plenty of homes in Tamarac have at least one of these, and a power problem in that house is a different kind of problem.

A few practical things:

• If your oxygen concentrator has stopped and you have backup cylinders, switch to them now, before you do anything else.
• If you are on any equipment that cannot be without power and there is no backup, and the outage is not something a breaker reset fixed, call 911 or your medical provider first. An electrician is the second call.
• Insulin and other refrigerated medications will hold in a closed refrigerator for a number of hours. Do not open the door to check. Put the medication in a cooler with ice only if the outage runs long.
• If you have a medical alert pendant, it usually works on a battery and a cellular connection and should keep working. Keep it on you.
• Tell us on the phone that there is medical equipment in the house. It changes how we handle the call.

For anyone in this situation, having a small battery backup on the critical device, and talking to us in daylight about a generator or a properly wired backup circuit, is worth doing before the next storm season rather than after.

Sparking Outlets, Buzzing Switches and Hot Cover Plates

A little blue spark when you plug something in is normal for some appliances. A spark that is bigger than that, or one that leaves a black mark, or a switch that crackles when you flip it, is not. Neither is an outlet cover that feels warm, or one that has turned brown or yellow around the slots.

Stop using the outlet or the switch. If you know which breaker feeds it, turn that breaker off. If you do not, that is fine, just do not plug anything into it and do not use that switch until we have replaced it. Behind a sparking outlet in a Tamarac home built in the 1960s or 1970s there is nearly always a loose connection, and in some of those homes the connection is aluminum wire under a screw meant for copper. Both are fixable. Neither should be ignored.

A lamp cord that is warm, a power strip that smells, or an extension cord under a rug that has been there for years belongs in the trash tonight, not on the to-do list. Cords are the thing we see start fires in senior homes more than anything in the walls.

Storms: Before They Arrive and After They Pass

Tamarac is far enough inland that surge is not the worry here. Wind, rain, lightning and long outages are. Here is what an emergency electrician in Tamarac tells customers before and after a storm.

Before

Charge everything: phone, medical device batteries, flashlights. Know where your panel is and how to switch off the main, so you can do it if water gets in or if you are told to. If you have a portable generator, have it outside the house before the storm, not in the garage waiting. If you have a whole-house generator, make sure it has run its weekly self-test recently.

During

If the lights flicker and dim repeatedly, that is the utility system struggling, and it is normal in a storm. If your lights go very bright in one room and very dim in another at the same time, that is not normal. That pattern means the neutral connection to your house has failed, and it will burn out your television, your refrigerator and your air conditioner control board within minutes. Switch the main off if you can do it safely, and call the utility and then us.

After

Look, do not touch. If there is a wire on the ground in your yard, on your roof, or hanging from the pole, treat it as live even if it looks dead, and stay well away from it and from any puddle near it. Call 911 if it is sparking or across a road, and report it to the utility. If the pipe that carries the wire into your house is bent or pulled away from the wall, that is the same thing: stay away, and the utility has to disconnect before we can repair it.

If a portable generator is running, it must be outdoors, well away from doors and windows, and it must never be plugged into a wall outlet to feed the house. That sends electricity back out onto the street lines and can kill the crew working on them. It also fills a house with carbon monoxide if it is anywhere near an opening. We see this every storm season, and we would rather say it too many times than not enough.

Water Near the Panel or in the Outlets

A roof leak that runs down the wall behind the panel. A washing machine hose that lets go next to the laundry outlet. Rain blowing through a screened porch onto an outlet. A flooded garage in a low section of the city after a heavy summer downpour.

Water and electricity together are the one situation where we ask you not to be brave. Do not step in water in a room where an outlet, an appliance or the panel could be in it. Do not touch a wet panel. If the main is dry and you can reach it without standing in water, switch it off. If not, stay out of that room and call us, and we can have the utility cut the power at the meter if it comes to that.

Anything electrical that has been under water, an outlet, a switch, a breaker, the bottom of a panel, is replaced rather than dried out. It may seem to work afterward. It is not safe, and it can fail when you need it most. That is not us being cautious for the sake of it. It is how the equipment is built.

Who Fixes What in Kings Point, the Mainlands and Other Communities

A lot of Tamarac lives in an association. Kings Point, the Mainlands of Tamarac Lakes, Lime Bay, Concord Village, the villa sections around the Woodlands. When someone in those communities needs an emergency electrician in Tamarac, there is a line between what belongs to you and what belongs to the association, and at night it matters who to call.

As a rule, the panel inside your unit, the outlets, switches and lights inside your unit, and the wiring between them are yours. The meter, the wire from the meter to your panel in many buildings, the hallway and outside lighting, the elevator, the clubhouse and the pool equipment are the association's. If your neighbors in the same building lost power at the same time you did, it is likely on the association side, and the management office or the after-hours line should be told.

We work on both sides. Owners call us directly for their unit. Associations and management companies call us for the building, and for the ones that want us on file before something breaks, that is what our property management electrical service is for. If you call us about a problem that turns out to be the association's, we will tell you that, and we will tell you what to say to them.

What Happens When You Call Us at Night

A person answers when you call an emergency electrician in Tamarac through our number. Not a recording, not a form. We will ask what you are seeing, smelling and hearing, whether anything has been switched off, whether anyone in the house needs power for medical reasons, and how to find you. Then we tell you what to do while you wait, and we dispatch the closest available electrician.

When the electrician arrives, they will show you what they found before they fix it, in plain words, and if you want someone else on the phone while they explain it, they will wait. You will get a price for the repair before the repair starts, based on what they are looking at, not a number invented over the phone. Nobody will pressure you into anything beyond making the house safe tonight. If there is more that should be done, we will tell you that, and you can think about it in daylight.

The wider list of what we do at night is on our emergency electrical repairs page, and if you want to know who you are calling, our about page says it plainly.

Areas We Cover in Tamarac

We come to every part of the city. The Kings Point villages off West McNab Road, the Mainlands sections and the original Tamarac Lakes neighborhoods east of State Road 7, the Woodlands, Lime Bay, Concord Village, Westwood, and the single-family streets on either side of Commercial Boulevard. We travel Commercial Boulevard, McNab Road, University Drive, Pine Island Road, Nob Hill Road and State Road 7 to get there, using the Sawgrass Expressway and the Turnpike from farther out. Sunrise, North Lauderdale, Lauderdale Lakes, Oakland Park and Coral Springs sit on those same routes, and the complete list of places we serve is on our service area page.

We are a mobile contractor. We do not have an office in Tamarac, and we will never ask you to come to one.

Talk to an Electrician in Tamarac

You do not have to describe the problem correctly. You only have to describe it. Tell us what you see and we will take it from there. Call (954) 602-0050, any hour, and if it turns out to be something small, we will be glad to tell you so.