Electrical guides worth reading before you call

Plain explanations of the things we get called about most, written so you can tell the difference between something annoying and something urgent.

Urgent right now?

If you have a burning smell, sparking or no power, stop reading and call.

Answered 24 hours a day.

There are only four reasons a breaker trips, and one of them should have you reaching for the phone rather than the reset switch.

Most homeowners upgrade their panel for one of two reasons: it failed, or they ran out of room. Here is how to tell which is coming.

The charger is rarely the expensive part. What drives the price is the distance between your panel and your parking spot.

Knob and tube was competent engineering for its era. The problem is the century of modifications that came after it.

A PSPS is not a two-hour outage. Planning for one properly means thinking in days, not hours.

Wiring rarely fails all at once. It tells you it is finished in small ways for years first.

One protects you from electricity. The other protects your house from itself. They are not interchangeable.

The questions that matter most are about pricing structure and diagnosis, not about the tools in the van.

The difference between a ceiling that looks designed and one that looks dotted is decided before anyone cuts a hole.

The expensive part of a commercial electrical failure is almost never the repair. It is the hours you could not trade.