Emergency electrician in Port Douglas, answering 24 hours

Ring us first, then have a look at the board with a torch. Do not stand in front of a wet switchboard and do not keep flicking a circuit breaker back on. You can ring 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including the middle of the night and the whole of the wet season. Day or night, we pick up the phone. Plenty of sparkies up here take the phone off the hook at half past three. We do not.

What to do before we get there

• Find the switchboard. Usually on an outside wall, in the carport, or in the hallway of older Port Douglas units. Have a torch, not a candle. It helps if you can tell us which switch has dropped.
• Do not reset a circuit breaker or safety switch more than once. If it trips straight back off, something on that circuit is faulty and resetting it repeatedly is putting current back into the fault. Leave it off and tell us which one it was.
• Stay away from anything wet. Water in the switchboard, water through the ceiling, water anywhere near power points, do not touch it. Get everyone clear of the area.
• Unplug what you can reach safely. If the power dropped when the kettle or the pool pump kicked in, unplug it. Half the time that tells us the answer before we arrive.
• Check the neighbours. If their lights are out too it is a network outage, not your house, and we will tell you that on the phone rather than charge you to come out and confirm it.

What counts as a real emergency

Burning smell, buzzing or crackling from the switchboard, visible sparks, a hot power point, exposed wiring, water into any electrical fitting, a safety switch that will not stay in, or total loss of power to a house or business. Also: no power to a commercial kitchen, a cool room, a lift, a fire system or a barra tank, because things spoil and people are stuck. Not an emergency, though we will still book it: one dead light, a fan that has stopped, an oven that will not heat.

What happens when you ring

In office hours you get a person straight away. After hours we still pick up the phone, day or night. We ask what is off, what the board is doing and whether anything is wet or hot. If it can be made safe over the phone we will talk you through isolating that circuit, so you have power to the rest of the house while you wait. Then we tell you who is coming and roughly when. The van carries circuit breakers, safety switches and enough cable to get most faults sorted on the first visit. Commercial customers get priority under our Same Day Service Guarantee: ring by 2pm on a business day and we attend that day.

We have seen your fault before

Fault finding, no power and tripping is the biggest single category in our system by a long way, and a good share of it gets flagged as an emergency. Up here the causes repeat: ants and geckos building up inside outdoor enclosures and bridging terminals, salt air chewing out coastal fittings, humidity in an old cable joint, water tracking into a pool light or pump circuit, a tree limb into the service line during a blow. Port Douglas alone accounts for 8,998 of our jobs since 2020, across 1,028 separate customers. We know the boards in the older complexes and we know which units share a main.

After a storm or flood

If your place has been through water, do not try to bring it back on yourself. Verification testing is required before reconnection, and as Electrical Safety Queensland puts it, "a licensed electrician will need to perform this task and a certificate of test will ensure your local electricity distribution entity can reconnect your service." We do that testing, under QLD Electrical Contractor Licence 82270 and fully insured.

Source: Electrical Safety Queensland, electrical safety during storms.