Emergency electrician in Alicante: when to really call

Electrical faults have an annoying habit: they turn up at night, at the weekend, or on the one day the house is full of guests. And with them comes the same question every time: is this an emergency that needs solving now, or can it wait until morning? Getting that call right matters. Calling someone out at 3 a.m. for something that would happily wait until Monday costs money you didn't need to spend — and waiting until Monday with a cable heating up can cost far more than money.

This is the guidance we give on the phone every week at ElectriPro Alicante: what counts as an emergency, what doesn't, what you can check yourself in three minutes, and what to expect from an urgent call-out in Alicante and along the Costa Blanca.

This is an emergency: call now

If any of the following is happening, stop investigating on your own. Isolate the circuit if you can do so safely, and call:

• A burning smell, smoke or melted plastic at the consumer unit, at a socket or in an appliance.
• Sparking, arcing or buzzing when you plug something in, or a socket that is warm to the touch.
• The RCD (differential) won't stay on. If it trips again and again, there is a real fault — it is protecting you.
• Water on the installation: a leak, a flood, damp inside the panel, or a short circuit after a storm.
• A tingle or shock from a tap, the washing machine, an appliance casing or around the pool. That points to an earthing fault and does not wait.
• A damaged cable, an open consumer unit or a broken socket within reach of children or pets.
• The whole home with no power while the rest of the building and the street have supply, and you can't work out which circuit is at fault.
• A business stopped: refrigeration, a kitchen mid-service, a communal lift, or premises with no emergency lighting.

In these cases the deciding factor isn't the price of the visit. An active electrical fault does not settle down on its own. It almost always gets worse.

This can wait until tomorrow (and will cost you less)

These jobs are real and do need fixing, but they don't justify the surcharge of a night call-out:

• A single socket or light point that has stopped working, with the rest of the house normal.
• A blown or flickering light fitting, or a tube that takes a while to strike.
• A breaker that trips only when the oven, the hob and the air conditioning run together. That is an overload: switch something off and call in the morning to review your contracted power.
• A broken doorbell or video entry system.
• A water heater that isn't heating, provided nothing smells or is dripping onto the installation.
• Anything you want to extend, move or improve: more sockets, a new consumer unit, lighting.

An honest suggestion: if you can't decide which list you're on, describe it to us and we'll tell you whether we need to come now or whether tomorrow is fine. We would rather not charge for an emergency that wasn't one.

Three minutes before you call

These checks won't fix the fault, but they change the whole conversation — and often the price:

1. Look out of the window. If your neighbours and the street lights are also dark, it's a distribution company outage and there is nothing to repair inside the house.
2. Go to the consumer unit and see what has tripped: the main switch, the RCD (the one with the test button), or one specific circuit breaker. It's the single most useful thing you can tell us.
3. Unplug whatever was on the affected circuit and try to reset once. If it trips again, leave it off and don't insist.
4. Note whether the problem covers the whole house, one room, or one appliance. That detail alone narrows the diagnosis.

The full step-by-step method is in what to do during a power cut.

And what you must never do: bypass or strap a tripping RCD, open the consumer unit to touch wiring, or handle anything with wet hands or standing on a chair in the dark.

What to tell us when you write or call

The better the description, the more likely the technician arrives with the right part in the van and fixes it in a single visit:

• What tripped, and whether it stays on or not.
• Since when, and what happened just before: a storm, starting the washing machine, a flash, building works.
• Scope: the whole house, one area, one appliance.
• Type of property: apartment, villa, commercial unit, communal garage.
• Rough age of the installation and whether the consumer unit has ever been replaced.
• The exact address and how to get in — urbanisation, floor, whether there is a concierge or the gate has to be opened from inside. In large Costa Blanca urbanisations, access is what wastes the most time.

If you can, send a photo of the consumer unit with the cover closed through the form. A photo says a lot.

How an urgent call-out is priced

Better to understand this beforehand, not afterwards. An emergency job has three parts:

• The call-out, which depends on distance and time of day: a mid-morning visit is not the same as a 3 a.m. one.
• Labour for the diagnosis and repair time.
• Materials that need replacing: an RCD, a breaker, a socket outlet, a length of cable.

Our commitment is simple: we tell you the call-out charge before we set off, and if opening the panel reveals a bigger repair than expected, we stop, explain and quote before carrying on. Nobody should discover the price at the end.

Very often the emergency is resolved by leaving the property safe and with power on the healthy circuits that same night, with the definitive repair — a new consumer unit, a renewed circuit — done calmly during normal hours. That is the cheaper option, and usually the one we recommend.

The typical Costa Blanca emergencies

After years of call-outs here, the patterns repeat:

• Summer and air conditioning. July and August concentrate the overload trips: several split units, the pool, the hob and the water heater all competing for a contracted power that was sized twenty years ago.
• Damp and salt air. On the seafront, junction boxes, outdoor panels and terrace sockets suffer. Corrosion causes leakage that trips the RCD with no obvious cause.
• Storms and gota fría. A nearby lightning strike takes out the router, the solar inverter, the air-conditioning board or the garage door electronics. The saving here is surge protection, which costs a fraction of what gets burnt.
• Empty homes and holiday lets. An RCD that trips in a closed-up house means a defrosted fridge, an alarm off the air and — if guests are arriving — a one-star review. For owners who don't live here, the measures in holiday home security on the Costa Blanca catch this earlier.
• Pools and gardens. Pumps, submerged lights and irrigation are the number one cause of earth leakage in villas.
• Someone else's refurbishment. A wall screw straight through a cable run is more common than you'd think.

Where we cover

We work in Alicante city and across the Costa Blanca, with urgent call-outs attended outside office hours too: Playa San Juan, Sant Joan d'Alacant, El Campello, Mutxamel, San Vicente del Raspeig, Elche, Santa Pola, Benidorm, Villajoyosa, l'Alfàs del Pi, Altea, Calpe, Torrevieja, Guardamar del Segura and Orihuela Costa, among others. The full list is on service areas.

We work in Spanish, English, Russian and Ukrainian — which matters more than it sounds at midnight: almost every phone-diagnosis mistake comes from not understanding each other.

How to avoid the next emergency

Most of the night call-outs we attend were avoidable. Three measures cover nearly all of them:

• Review the consumer unit if it is more than 20 years old, still has fuses, has no RCD, or has a single RCD for the whole house. We cover it in when to replace your consumer unit and in the electrical panel service in Alicante.
• Check the earthing, especially in older properties and villas with a pool: earthing and grounding in Alicante.
• Fit surge protection if you have a solar inverter, an EV charger, home automation, or simply electronics you care about.

And if you have just bought a property or are about to rent it out, an electrical inspection tells you what's coming before the RCD tells you at three in the morning.

In short

It's an emergency if it smells, sparks, gets hot, gives you a shock, involves water on the installation, or leaves a whole property dark with no explanation. Everything else can wait until morning and will cost you less.

If you have a fault right now, message us through the form saying what tripped and since when, or see our emergency electrician service in Alicante. Calling in time is always cheaper than a late repair.