Electrical repairs and fault finding in Los Angeles
When a breaker keeps tripping or an outlet goes dead, the cause is usually behind a cover somewhere, and our job as electricians is finding it. This is also where the outlets a home inspection flagged get their GFCI or AFCI protection.
Coming out to look is free. Your price the same day you ask.
What decides this job
- Whether it is an overload, a short or a fault to ground
- Where the insulation has failed, which is usually at a splice
- Whether new protection goes in at the outlet or at the breaker
- Which utility and which permit desk your address is on. Look up your address
What a breaker that keeps tripping is telling you
A breaker that trips once may have been a kettle and a heater on the same circuit. A breaker that trips again is reporting a condition, and the three it usually reports are an overload, a short between conductors, and a fault to ground.
Resetting it does not answer which. That is the job: narrowing it down to the circuit, then to the run, then to the box, and then telling you what it will take to fix.
An outlet that stopped working
Look for a GFCI outlet first, the kind with test and reset buttons. One that has tripped, often in a bathroom or the garage, can cut power to ordinary outlets further along the same circuit, and pressing reset brings them back.
If nothing resets, the usual cause is a loose connection at the dead outlet or at the one before it on the same circuit. That is the box we open first.
Lights that flicker
When one fixture flickers, the cause is usually the lamp, or a dimmer that was not made for an LED. We explain the dimmer side on our lighting and fixtures page.
Lights that flicker in several rooms at once, or dim and stay dim when something large switches on, can point to a loose connection further back, at the panel or where the service comes in. We trace it to that connection before anything is replaced.
Why a light works until somebody opens the box
In most Los Angeles houses the conductor is still fine. What fails is the insulation around it, and it fails at the splice, where it has been bent, taped and bent again. So the circuit keeps working until somebody opens the box and moves it, and then it stops.
That is why a small job in an older house sometimes turns into a rewire, and why we say what we can see before anything is opened.
GFCI and AFCI, and why an inspection flagged yours
A home inspection report will often list outlets in a kitchen, a bathroom, a garage, a laundry or outdoors as needing ground fault protection, and bedroom circuits as needing arc fault protection. Neither one means the wiring is broken. The requirement changed and the house did not.
Adding the protection is usually straightforward. What decides the work is whether it goes in at the outlet or at the breaker, and that depends on how the circuit is wired.
What happens on the visit
We find the fault, tell you what it is, and write down what it takes to fix it before anything else is touched. If what you have is a reset and nothing more, we will say so and there is nothing to pay for a repair that was not needed.
If you can smell burning or see scorching
Stop using the circuit. Do not put the breaker back on to see whether it holds. If there is smoke or flame, call 911 before you call anybody else.
Say what is happening and we will tell you what it involves.
One sentence about what is happening will do. Sending it costs nothing and does not book a visit.