Do you need an emergency electrician, or can it wait until morning?
Not everything that goes wrong with the electrics needs somebody out that evening, and a decent electrician will tell you so rather than sell you a call-out.
Three things put a job in the genuine emergency bracket. Anything you can smell or see: a hot socket, scorched plastic, browning around a switch, or a burning fishy smell coming off the consumer unit.
Anything wet: a leak above a light fitting, water tracking down into a socket, a flooded cellar with circuits running through it. And anything that will not stay on safely, most often a breaker or RCD that drops out again the second you reset it, because that is the protection doing its job and telling you a fault is sitting on the circuit.
Below that sits the loss-of-supply bracket. No hot water, a dead cooker circuit, a shop trading with half its lighting out. None of it dangerous, but it stops the house or the business working, so it wants sorting quickly rather than next week.
Then there is the third bracket, and it is worth being honest about it: one dead socket, a light that has stopped working, a job that has already waited a fortnight. That will keep until a normal appointment, and you will pay less for it.
Two minutes of checks before you ring anyone
None of this involves taking a cover off anything. If what you are looking at is scorched, hot or wet, skip straight past this section and call.
Start at the consumer unit and look at which switch has moved. On a modern board the small breakers protect individual circuits and the wider RCDs protect groups of them, so what has tripped already tells you roughly where the fault lives: one breaker down means one circuit, an RCD down means everything sitting behind it.
Then unplug. Whatever was running at the moment it went is the prime suspect, and it is very often a kettle, a washing machine element, an immersion heater, or an outdoor extension lead that has taken in water.
Pull everything on the affected circuit out of the wall, then try the switch once. If it holds, plug things back in one at a time and you will find the culprit yourself without paying anybody.
If it does not hold, leave it off and ring us. Forcing a breaker back on repeatedly against a live fault is the one thing not to do, and there is a better move, which is in the questions at the bottom of this page.
When it is not your wiring at all
Before you pay anybody, check whether the problem is even inside your property. Look at your neighbours' windows and the streetlights. If the whole row is dark, the fault is out on the network rather than in your consumer unit, and no electrician can fix it for you.
South Yorkshire's distribution network is run by Northern Powergrid, and power cuts are reported free on 105 from any phone. That call costs you nothing. A call-out to be told your supply is off costs you money.
There is a second version of this that catches people out. The service head where the supply enters the building, the sealed box sitting before your meter with the main fuse inside it, belongs to the network operator. Not to you, and not to us.
If that fuse has gone, which does happen after a serious fault or in an older property carrying a heavy modern load, it is Northern Powergrid who cut the seal and replace it. We can tell you within minutes that is what you are looking at and point you at the right number, but no electrician is permitted to break that seal.
We would far rather say that to you on the phone than turn up and invoice you for it.
The faults we get called out to most
Twenty years of call-outs across the Dearne Valley and the same handful of faults come round and round.
Nuisance tripping that has stopped being a nuisance is the big one: an RCD that used to go once a month now dropping several times a day. That is almost always moisture getting somewhere it should not, or a cable that has quietly degraded, rather than a mystery.
Dead sockets around a ring usually trace back to a single loose connection heating up behind a faceplate or in a junction box, and locating it is a proper fault-finding job rather than a guess.
Cooker and shower circuits fail differently. Those high-current connections work loose over the years and cook themselves, which is why an electric shower that ran hot and cold for a fortnight before it died is rarely a plumbing problem.
Then there is water. A leaking bathroom, or a roof after a bad night, will find its way into the downstairs light fittings, and that circuit needs isolating before anything else happens in the house.
Commercially it tends to be three-phase: a lost phase taking out half a unit, a failed contactor, or a distribution board that has been added to one time too many. We treat those as urgent, because they normally stop a business trading.
What happens when we get there
The order never changes: make it safe, find out why, tell you what it costs, then fix it.
Making safe usually means isolating the affected circuit so the rest of the property carries on working normally. You are not sat in the dark while we work out what has happened.
The diagnosis is where the skill is. Insulation resistance testing and continuity work with proper instruments will pin a fault to a section of circuit far quicker than lifting floorboards on a hunch, and that keeps your bill down rather than ours up.
Then you get told. If it is a half-hour repair we will do it there and then, and you get the certification that goes with it.
If what we have uncovered is bigger, a consumer unit that was never safe or wiring that has reached the end of its life, we will say so plainly, leave the property usable in the meantime, and quote the proper job separately instead of turning a bad evening into a rushed decision. That side of things lives on our electrical installations page.
Every job is done to BS7671 by an NICEIC-approved firm, and the emergency ones are no exception.
Hours, and what a call-out costs
We are not going to pretend to be a national 24-hour switchboard. Those numbers tend to ring out, or hand you to somebody two counties away who quotes a fortune to travel.
FRM is a local electrical firm. The normal working day is Monday to Friday, 8am to 4:30pm, and beyond that we take emergency calls into the evening and at weekends.
On price, the honest answer is that nobody can quote a repair sight unseen, because the same symptom can be a five-minute connection or the best part of a day's fault-finding.
What we can do is tell you the charge before we set off, so nothing lands on the invoice that you had not already agreed to.
Where we come out to
We are based in Wath upon Dearne, which puts most of the Dearne Valley within a few minutes' drive: Swinton, Mexborough, Brampton and West Melton are all on the doorstep.
Beyond that we cover Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Sheffield, and every town we work in is listed across our areas we cover pages.
If you are just outside that and stuck, ring anyway. We will either come to you or tell you straight that somebody nearer will get there faster.