Electrical Troubleshooting & Repair Services in NH, MA & ME

A breaker that trips is doing its job. It is telling you the circuit is carrying more than it is rated for, or that there is a fault on the line. The three usual causes are an overloaded circuit, a short circuit where a hot wire touches a neutral or ground, or a ground fault. A breaker that trips once when you ran the microwave and the toaster together is an overload. One that trips with nothing plugged in, or trips again the moment you reset it, is a fault and should not be reset repeatedly. We trace which circuit and which device is causing it rather than swapping the breaker and hoping.

Flickering on one fixture is usually the fixture, the bulb, or a loose connection at the switch. Flickering across the whole house, or lights that dim every time the furnace or well pump kicks on, points at something larger: a loose service neutral, a failing main breaker, or a service that is undersized for the load. That second kind is worth looking at soon, because a loose neutral can put uneven voltage across your appliances. We check the panel and the service entrance before chasing individual fixtures.

Stop using it and shut off the breaker for that circuit. If you cannot tell which breaker it is, shut off the main. A small spark when you plug something in is usually normal; a sustained spark, scorch marks, or a burning smell is not, and both point at a loose connection heating up behind the plate. Do not open the device yourself. If you see smoke or flame, or the smell is strong and spreading, call 911 first. We are not a 24-hour emergency service and we will tell you that honestly rather than have you wait on us while something burns.

A dimmer switch running slightly warm is normal, because dimmers shed heat. An ordinary outlet or switch that is warm to the touch is not. Warmth means resistance, and resistance at a connection means a loose screw, a back-stabbed wire that has worked free, or a device that has aged out. Those connections get hotter over time, which is how they end up starting fires inside a wall cavity. Turn the circuit off and have it looked at.

A GFCI trips when it senses current leaking to ground, even a very small amount. Sometimes that is moisture in an outdoor or bathroom receptacle, and it clears once things dry out. Sometimes it is a failing appliance on the circuit, which you can test by unplugging things one at a time. And sometimes the GFCI itself has simply worn out, since they have a service life and older ones fail closed or fail nuisance-tripping. If it will not reset with nothing plugged in, the device or the wiring behind it is the problem.

That pattern usually means you have lost one of the two legs feeding the panel. A house gets 240 volts across two 120-volt legs, and if one drops out, everything on that leg goes dead while the other half keeps working. The cause sits at the main breaker, the service entrance, or the utility side. Sometimes a breaker has failed internally without visibly moving to the off position. This one is worth a call rather than a poke around, because it involves the service conductors.

Yes, and it comes up regularly in homes built between roughly 1965 and 1973. Aluminum expands and contracts more than copper, so the connections at outlets and switches loosen over the years and heat up. The fix is not ripping out the wiring. It is treating each connection properly with connectors rated for the job, or pigtailing to copper at every device. If you have aluminum branch circuits and warm plates or flickering, that combination is worth addressing rather than watching.

Yes. Brenden Moore holds Master Electrician licenses in New Hampshire (#14511), Massachusetts (#22825), and Maine (#MS60023064). Both states publish a license lookup, so you can verify the numbers yourself before you call. Massachusetts also requires a licensed electrician to pull the permit on most work, which is worth knowing when a quote comes in low because someone is planning to skip that step.

Resetting a tripped breaker and changing a bulb or a fixture are reasonable homeowner jobs. Anything past that is worth handing over. DIY electrical work can void a homeowner's policy, it fails at inspection when you sell, and the failure mode is a fire rather than a leak. The other reason is diagnostic: most repair calls we take are not the thing the homeowner thought was broken, and replacing parts by guess gets expensive faster than paying someone to trace it.

We look at the problem, tell you what is causing it, and give you the price in writing before any repair starts. Diagnosis on a repair call takes real time, so we do not quote a hard number over the phone for something nobody has seen yet. If you describe the symptom and send a photo of the panel, we can usually tell you what range of job you are looking at before we drive out.