Electrical questions

Find every GFCI in the house and check whether one has tripped, then check the breaker properly. GFCI outlets protect other outlets downstream of them, and those can be in completely different rooms, so a dead dining room outlet is regularly caused by a tripped GFCI in a garage or bathroom. A tripped breaker often does not look obviously off; push it fully off first, then back on. If the GFCI will not reset or the breaker trips straight back, stop and call, because both are telling you something.

Yes, and it should be treated as urgent. Electrical devices should be at room temperature. Warmth means resistance, resistance means heat, and heat at a connection is how fires start. The same goes for a burning smell, brown or black discolouration around a socket, or sparking beyond the tiny momentary arc normal with a heavy load. Switch that circuit off at the panel and tell us when you call, because it gets escalated to a person rather than into a booking queue.

Almost always one failed connection upstream, and usually a back-stab. Most receptacles allow the conductor to be pushed into a hole in the back rather than wrapped around the screw terminal; it is faster to install, it is a worse connection, and after twenty years of thermal cycling it loosens. Outlets are daisy-chained, so a failure at one box kills everything downstream. Telling us which outlets are affected turns an hour of hunting into ten minutes.

Often not, and it is very common in older Triangle houses where someone replaced a two-prong receptacle with a three-prong one without a ground being present. It looks safe and it is not: anything relying on that ground has none. The correct fixes are running a ground where a route exists, or fitting GFCI protection and labelling it as code requires. Swapping in another three-prong outlet is not one of them.

Yes, and it should be replaced. Both brands were installed widely across the Triangle from the 1950s through the 1980s, and both have documented failure modes where a breaker fails to trip under fault conditions, which means the protection you are relying on may not operate. There are no reliable replacement breakers for either, so replacing the panel is the only fix. Insurers increasingly ask about them.

Six to eight hours, on one day. The work has to be scheduled around a utility disconnect, which we book with the power company rather than choose, and the county has to inspect before the utility will reconnect. We sequence both so the panel is signed off and the power comes back the same day. Expect two to four weeks from accepting the quote to the work happening, driven by the permit and the disconnect appointment.

No, and it is one of the most dangerous things a homeowner can do. The breaker is sized to protect the cable behind it, not the appliance in front of it. Fit a 30 amp breaker on cable rated for 20 and you have not solved anything, you have removed the protection and left the cable free to overheat inside a wall where nobody will see it. A breaker that trips is doing its job and reporting a fault: an overloaded circuit, a failing appliance, a short, or a genuinely undersized circuit that needs a new one run. Which of those it is takes twenty minutes to establish. A total loss of power is a different question and is answered in our emergency set.

That is the first thing we work out, and the answer changes the whole job. A Level 2 charger is one of the largest continuous loads in a house, so it is not about whether there is a spare slot but whether the service has headroom once your existing loads are counted. With plenty of headroom it is a straightforward circuit. Tight but workable means a load management device, which throttles the charger when the house is busy and is far cheaper than an upgrade. No headroom means a panel upgrade first.

For most Triangle households, no. If you drive a normal commute and charge overnight, a 32 amp charger replaces your entire daily range several times over while you sleep, and a 48 amp unit needs heavier cable, a larger breaker and more panel headroom at every step. The faster unit earns its cost for high-mileage drivers and two-EV households. There is also a hard limit: your car's onboard charger caps what it can accept, so a bigger circuit on a car that cannot use it buys nothing.

No, never. That backfeeds power out onto the utility lines, where it can electrocute the line worker restoring your street, and it is what a transfer switch exists to prevent. Portable generators also produce carbon monoxide in quantities that kill, so they must run outdoors only, well away from the house, never in a garage even with the door open, and never near a window or air intake.

Usually not, and choosing essential circuits instead is frequently half the cost. An essential-circuits system feeds a subpanel carrying what you actually need in an outage, which in the Triangle is typically the fridge, the freezer, some lighting, internet, a well or sump pump, and one HVAC system. The difference in lived experience during a two-day outage is small. Air conditioning is the decision point, because a heat pump is a large starting load that often pushes you into the next generator size.

Almost never a faulty fitting. It is a dimmer designed for incandescent bulbs driving an LED load: old dimmers expect a resistive load of a few hundred watts, and a room of LEDs might draw thirty, so the dimmer cannot regulate that low and you get flicker at the bottom of the range. The fix is an LED-compatible dimmer matched to the specific fittings, which manufacturers publish compatibility lists for.

Only on a fan-rated brace, and a standard ceiling box is not one. A fan weighs a good deal and, unlike a light, it moves. A standard box is rated to hold a static fixture, and a fan hung from one works the box loose over months of vibration until the whole fan comes down. A fan already hanging from an unrated box is the most common unsafe thing we find in this category, usually where a previous owner swapped a light for a fan themselves.