If your house has lost power, it can spell disaster. We all rely on electricity for our lighting, TV and entertainment, food refrigeration, charging our wireless devices, connecting to WIFI, cooking appliances and more. In fact, we are pretty lost without it. And if you have children, you’ll be familiar with the cries of despair when their devices won’t connect to the internet.

The first thing to do if you lose power in your home is check whether your home is an isolated case in the street, or if it’s a widespread outage. If your neighbours don’t have power either, the problem will be with your power provider rather than the electrical systems in your home.

Your electricity company usually has an online checker to see if there are any outages in your area, how long it is expected to last and the cause of it. If there are several homes without power, it shouldn’t take too long for everything to be up and running again.
If the power-cut occurs at night-time, remember that instead of having to rummage around for a torch, our mobile phones all have a built-in torch so use this to avoid any accidents.

If your home is the only house that has lost power, the likely cause is that an appliance has caused your electricity to overload or trip. Here’s what to do in that situation:

• With the main trip switch off and your mains power off, flip all switches off.
• Switch one switch on and turn the mains power back on. If the power connected to that switch works, and the main trip switch doesn’t turn off, you know that the problem isn’t with that supply.
• Repeat this, adding one switch at a time until you find the cause of the electricity to trip.

Once you’ve identified the switch that’s causing the electricity to trip, turn the power off again. Unplug or switch off everything that runs on the faulty circuit. Common culprits are small electrical items such as toasters, kettles, hairdryers, televisions, or electric cookers. Try to flip the switch back on. If the main trip goes again and everything is unplugged, then there is more likely a problem with the wiring. If the power stays on, then you know it is one of your appliances. Try these one by one to work out which appliances is causing the electricity to trip.

If you have found a fault with your wiring, an appliance, or your fuse box, under no circumstances should you try and diagnose and fix an electrical problem in the home yourself. This is dangerous and against the law – incorrect wiring can be a serious hazard in the home and can even cause serious injury or death.

Call a qualified electrician – we can help