Power outage at home: what to check before you call an electrician

First: is it the grid or is it you

Look outside. If the street lights and the neighbours' windows are dark too, the fault is on the grid and there is nothing to repair in your house. In Flanders the grid is run by Fluvius, whatever your energy supplier is. Fluvius publishes current outages on its website and you can report one on its 24-hour fault line, 078 35 35 00. Planned works are announced by letter a few days in advance, which is worth checking in the mail.

If you smell gas at any point, leave the house, do not switch anything on or off, and call the Fluvius gas emergency number 0800 65 0 65 from outside.

If the neighbours have power and you do not, the problem is between the street and your sockets. The next stop is the fuse box, which in a Belgian home is usually next to the meter in the hall, the garage or the cellar. If you have a digital meter, its small display should be lit; a dark meter with the neighbours on power points to the main fuse or the connection, which is Fluvius territory, not yours.

Reading a Belgian fuse box

Open the cover and you will find three kinds of switches. At the top or the left is the main residual current device, marked 300 mA, which protects the whole installation against earth leakage. Below it are one or more 30 mA residual current devices for wet rooms and appliances such as the washing machine, dryer and dishwasher. The rest are the automatic circuit breakers, one per circuit, marked 16 A or 20 A and ideally labelled: kitchen sockets, living room lights, boiler, and so on. Older homes may still have screw-in fuses with a coloured disc; a missing disc means the fuse has blown.

A tripped device sits in the middle or down position while its neighbours are up. The residual current devices also have a small test button marked T, which should trip the device when pressed; that is a safety check, not a reset. Reset means pushing the lever fully down and then fully up.

The reset procedure

Do it in this order, and do it once. A device that trips again immediately is telling you something.

• Switch off or unplug the appliances that were running when the power went: oven, dryer, kettle, heater, pump, the car charger
• Push all automatic breakers that are down firmly to the off position, then back on, one at a time
• Reset the 30 mA devices, then the 300 mA main device, each fully down and then up
• If everything holds, switch the appliances back on one by one, with a minute in between, and note which one trips the device
• If a breaker trips with nothing switched on, that circuit has a fault in the wiring or a socket; leave it off and use the rest of the house

Finding the appliance

The culprit is usually one of a short list. Heating elements that have absorbed moisture, in an oven, a dryer, a kettle or an outdoor heater, cause earth leakage and trip the 30 mA or 300 mA device. A motor that has failed, in a pump, a fridge compressor or a power tool, overloads a breaker. Outdoor sockets and garden lighting trip after heavy rain. A new appliance plugged in next to several others on one kitchen circuit can simply exceed the 16 A rating: a kettle, a toaster and a microwave together draw about 5 kW, which is more than a single circuit allows.

If an appliance trips the device every time, stop using it and leave it unplugged; that is a repair or replacement question, not an electrical one. If a circuit trips with everything unplugged, or if the 300 mA device trips and you cannot isolate the cause, the fault is in the fixed installation and it is time to call an electrician.

When not to touch anything

Some signs mean the installation itself is unsafe. Switch off the main device if you can do so without touching anything damaged, and call an emergency electrician rather than resetting again:

• A burning smell, discolouration or heat at the fuse box, a socket or a switch
• Sparks, a buzzing or crackling sound, or a breaker that is hot to the touch
• Water in or near the fuse box, a socket or a ceiling light, after a leak or flooding
• A device that trips immediately on reset with everything unplugged
• A digital meter that is dark while the neighbours have power
• Power loss in a home with a medical device, a freezer full of food or small children in winter, where waiting until morning is not reasonable

What to tell the electrician

An emergency call goes faster if you can say which device tripped, whether it holds after a reset, which appliance seems to cause it and whether there is any smell or water. Keep the fuse box accessible and note the age of the installation if you know it; a box without a 30 mA device or with screw fuses tells an electrician a lot before arrival.

An emergency call-out in Belgium has a fixed call-out rate that covers travel and the first hour, higher at night and at weekends, with parts at cost; a reputable service states the rate on the phone before leaving. Roakus-E runs a 24/7 emergency service across the province of Antwerp from Mol and is usually on site within the hour in the Kempen and within two hours in the city of Antwerp or Mechelen. In most cases the installation is made safe and back on the same visit, and if a definitive repair needs more work you get a quote for a planned second visit.