Emergency electrician in Belgrade

Most of the calls we get at night are not emergencies, and that is good news. A few are, and those do not wait for morning. Here is how to tell them apart.

When not to wait

These five signs mean switch off and call, without weighing up the cost of the visit.

A smell of burning or hot plastic when nothing is cooking and nothing is switched on. That is insulation burning. Switch off the main breaker.

Smoke, however faint, from a socket, a switch or the consumer unit.

Sparking or crackling in a socket as you push a plug in. Do not plug anything else into it.

A consumer unit that is warm to the touch, or one breaker noticeably warmer than the rest. There is a resistive joint inside, and it gets worse on its own.

A shock when you touch a tap, the sink or the casing of an appliance. That is not static; there is more on it in signs of a genuinely dangerous installation.

What to do while you wait

Switch off the main breaker if there is any smell or smoke, and leave it off.

If a breaker has tripped, reset it once. If it trips again straight away, that circuit has a short circuit or serious leakage. Leave it off and do not try a third time; the third attempt is the one that produces the smell.

Do not open the consumer unit. Even with every breaker off, the supply ahead of the main switch is still live, as set out under consumer unit.

Write down what was happening before the fault and what was switched on. That one sentence saves an hour of searching.

What is not an emergency, however it looks

I will tell you this on the phone, because there is no sense paying a night rate for something that keeps until nine in the morning.

A breaker that tripped once while the water heater and the washing machine were both running, with no smell at all. That is an overloaded circuit rather than a fault, and the same logic applies to an RCD that keeps tripping.

A bulb that flickers or has blown, and a socket that is dead but neither warm nor scorched.

How a call-out goes

First isolation and proof of no voltage with an instrument, not a test screwdriver. Then locating it: which circuit, and whether the fault is in an appliance, in the socket or in the wall.

A night visit is normally making it safe, not a full repair. The aim is that the flat is safe and that whatever can run does run until morning. Tracing a fault inside a wall is daytime work through fault diagnostics, because it takes measurement and time.

The price of the visit, including any night surcharge, is quoted on the phone before I set off. I never start work whose price has not been agreed first.

How far we come

Across the inner city. We are fastest in and around Zvezdara, where the base is; the centre and Novi Beograd are the next band out. Times per district are on the individual area pages, and they are real times rather than promises.