Not every electrical problem is an emergency. A dead outlet in a spare bedroom can probably wait until Monday. A flickering porch light is worth scheduling a service call, but it is not going to burn your house down tonight. The challenge for most homeowners is telling the difference between "inconvenient" and "dangerous." Getting that wrong in either direction costs you: calling for an emergency visit when it could have waited means paying after-hours rates unnecessarily, but ignoring a genuine hazard can lead to fire, electrocution, or catastrophic damage to your home's wiring.
Here are eight situations where you should not wait. If any of these describe what is happening in your Aiken home right now, call an electrician immediately.
1. You Smell Burning Near an Outlet, Switch, or Panel
A burning smell coming from any part of your electrical system is one of the clearest danger signals you can get. What you are smelling is typically the insulation around a wire overheating and beginning to break down. This happens when a connection becomes loose and current arcs across the gap, generating intense heat in a very small area. It can also occur when a wire is carrying more current than it was rated for, causing the copper itself to heat the surrounding insulation past its melting point.
The smell is often described as a hot, acrid, plasticky odor, sometimes with a fishy undertone. It may come and go depending on which circuits are loaded. Do not assume the problem has resolved itself because the smell faded. The underlying condition, whether it is a loose connection, a damaged wire, or an overloaded circuit, is still present and will continue to worsen. If you can identify which breaker controls the affected area, turn it off. If the smell is coming from the panel itself, turn off the main breaker and call immediately.
2. Outlets or Switches Are Sparking
A tiny, brief blue spark when you plug something in is normal. That happens because the electricity jumps the small air gap between the prong and the contact just before they touch. It is the same principle as static electricity, and it is harmless.
What is not normal: sparks that are yellow or white, sparks that last more than a split second, sparks that happen when nothing is being plugged in or unplugged, or sparks accompanied by a popping sound. These indicate arcing inside the device, which means either a connection has come loose, insulation has been damaged, or the outlet itself is failing. Sustained arcing generates temperatures above 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than hot enough to ignite wood framing, drywall paper, or insulation inside your wall cavity. Stop using the outlet immediately and kill the breaker for that circuit.
3. Your Breaker Panel Is Buzzing or Humming
A properly functioning breaker panel is essentially silent. You might hear a faint hum if you press your ear against it, but it should not produce any sound you can hear from a normal standing distance. A buzzing, crackling, or humming sound coming from the panel means something inside is not making solid contact. This could be a breaker that is failing internally, a bus bar connection that has loosened over time, or a wire lug that was never properly torqued during installation.
Loose connections inside a panel are particularly dangerous because the panel handles your entire home's electrical load. The heat generated by a poor connection in the panel can melt bus bars, damage adjacent breakers, and potentially start a fire inside the panel enclosure itself. This is not a situation where you wait and see if it gets worse. It will get worse.
4. You Have Lost Power to Part of Your Home
If half your house has power and the other half does not, and no breakers have tripped, you likely have a problem with one leg of your 240-volt service. Your home receives two 120-volt lines (called "legs") from the utility transformer. Each leg feeds roughly half the circuits in your panel. If one leg fails, either at the utility connection, the meter base, or inside your panel, everything on that leg goes dead while the other leg continues working normally.
Start by checking with your neighbors. If they are experiencing the same thing, it is probably a utility-side issue and you should call Dominion Energy. If the problem is limited to your house, the failure is somewhere between the meter and your panel, or inside the panel itself. This needs professional diagnosis because working inside a live panel is extremely dangerous. The remaining live leg is still carrying 120 volts and can kill you.
5. Water Has Come into Contact with Your Electrical System
Water and electricity are a lethal combination. If a pipe has burst near your electrical panel, a roof leak is dripping onto outlets or light fixtures, or flooding has reached the level of your outlets or wiring, you have an emergency. Water is a conductor. When it bridges electrical connections, it creates paths for current to flow where it was never intended to go, including through you if you step in a puddle that is energized.
Do not walk through standing water to reach your panel. If you can reach the main breaker safely without stepping in water, shut it off. If you cannot reach it safely, stay out of the affected area entirely and call both a plumber and an electrician. After any water intrusion event, all affected wiring, outlets, switches, and devices need to be inspected and tested before the circuits are re-energized. Corrosion from water exposure can cause failures weeks or months after the initial event if the damage is not identified and repaired.
6. A Power Line Has Fallen on or near Your Property
Aiken sees its share of summer thunderstorms and the occasional ice storm in winter, and both can bring down power lines. If a line has fallen on your property, on your car, or anywhere near your home, assume it is live. Downed power lines can carry thousands of volts, and they can energize the ground, fences, puddles, and anything else they touch. The line does not need to be sparking or moving to be deadly.
Stay at least 35 feet away and call 911, then call Dominion Energy to report the downed line. Do not attempt to move the line yourself, even with a wooden stick or rubber gloves. After the utility has cleared the line and restored service, call an electrician to inspect your meter base, weatherhead, and service entrance. The force of a falling line or the surge from a downed conductor can damage your home's service equipment in ways that are not visible from the outside.
7. A Breaker Trips Immediately Every Time You Reset It
A breaker that trips once is doing its job. Overloads happen, and the breaker is designed to handle them by interrupting the circuit. But a breaker that trips the instant you flip it back on is telling you there is a hard fault on that circuit: a short circuit where a hot wire is touching a neutral or ground wire, or a ground fault where current is leaking to ground through an unintended path.
Every time you reset a breaker into an active fault, you send a surge of current through the damaged area. This generates enormous heat at the fault point, even if the breaker trips again within a fraction of a second. Repeatedly resetting a tripping breaker is one of the most common ways homeowners accidentally start electrical fires. If a breaker will not stay on after one reset attempt, leave it off and call for service.
8. You See Smoke or Visible Damage Inside Your Electrical Panel
If you open your panel cover and see scorch marks, melted plastic, blackened wires, or actual smoke, shut off the main breaker if you can do so safely and call immediately. Visible damage inside a panel means the problem has already progressed well past the early warning stage. The heat required to melt breaker housings or scorch bus bars is extreme, and the conditions that created it are still present even if nothing is actively burning at the moment you look.
Do not attempt to remove or replace any components yourself. A damaged panel may have compromised connections that could arc or fail when disturbed. This is a job for a licensed electrician with the proper tools and protective equipment.
What to Do While You Wait for the Electrician
Once you have made the call, there are a few things you can do to keep your family safe while waiting. If it is safe to reach, turn off the main breaker. This de-energizes every circuit in the house and eliminates the risk of fire or shock from the affected area. Do not use any circuits or outlets that were involved in the problem, even if they seem to be working again. Do not touch anything wet that might be in contact with wiring. Gather your family in a safe area away from the panel and the affected part of the house. If you smell smoke or see flames, get everyone out and call 911.
What NOT to Do
Do not try to fix the problem yourself unless you are a licensed electrician. Opening a live panel, poking at a sparking outlet, or rewiring a circuit without proper training and tools can result in electrocution, and it can also make the underlying problem significantly worse. Do not ignore a "small" burning smell and assume it will go away. Electrical fires often smolder inside wall cavities for hours before they break through to where you can see them. By the time you see smoke coming from a wall, the fire has been burning behind it for a long time. And do not keep resetting a breaker that keeps tripping. Once is a test. Twice is pushing your luck. Three times is reckless.
What Emergency Electrical Service Looks Like
When we arrive for an emergency call, the first step is always diagnosis. We need to find exactly where the problem is and what caused it before we can fix anything. This involves testing circuits, inspecting connections, and sometimes opening up walls or panels to trace the fault. Once we have identified the issue, we isolate the affected area so the rest of your home can be safely re-energized. In many cases, we can complete a permanent repair on the spot. For more involved problems, such as a panel replacement or extensive rewiring, we will make the system safe for the night and schedule the full repair for the earliest available time.
Our goal on every emergency call is simple: make sure you and your family are safe, restore as much power as we can, and give you a clear, honest explanation of what happened and what needs to happen next.