My house in the city centre is Grade II listed. Can you do an emergency repair without listed building consent?

Emergency make-safe work and like-for-like repairs do not normally need consent, because you are not altering the historic fabric or character of the building. We isolate the fault, repair or replace on the existing route, and keep disturbance to plaster and joinery to a minimum. A full rewire is different: if it means chasing walls or lifting historic floors, speak to the district council's conservation team before planned work starts. We can document what we found to support that conversation.

Our cottage outside the city loses power in bad weather. Is that our wiring or the supply?

Often it is the network, not you. Villages around Chichester are fed by long overhead lines that take the brunt of coastal storms, and faults on those are the responsibility of the network operator, SSEN, not your electrician. The giveaway is whether neighbours are off too. If your house alone is dark, or the power is on but circuits keep tripping, that points inside the property, and that is where we come in. Testing the installation tells us definitively which side of the meter the problem sits.

I live in a flat above a shop on North Street. Our power went off but the shop's is fine. Whose problem is it?

Probably yours or your landlord's rather than the shop's. Converted buildings like that usually have one incoming supply split into separately metered submains, so the shop and each flat can fail independently. A tripped consumer unit in your hallway is your installation. A fault in the submain or a shared distribution board normally sits with the freeholder or managing agent. On the first visit we identify which it is and make things safe either way.

Can you come out tonight?

Yes. We run a 24 hour rota that covers evenings, weekends and bank holidays. Call and you get a real arrival window before anyone sets off, not a vague promise.

Emergency Electrician Chichester

House has no electricity at all

Nothing live anywhere sits above every protective device you own. Glance outside first, because a dark street makes it a network matter. The sealed cut-out belongs to the operator; the tails, main switch and everything after them are ours to test.

Only some rooms have power

Rooms do not have supplies, circuits do, and circuits rarely follow how the house is used. A dead portion normally means one device has released and taken every way grouped behind it. Which rooms survived tells us which group to examine.

One room has no lights

Working sockets prove nothing when lighting is separately protected. With that protection intact the interruption is in the wiring: a slack loop terminal at a rose, a worn switch, or a joint above the ceiling. In older properties it is often where the loop was later extended.

Consumer unit keeps tripping

Intermittent tripping is the awkward one, because by the time we arrive everything behaves. Leakage that comes and goes usually tracks the weather, an outdoor circuit or one appliance's cycle. Testing under load, plus a list of what was running each time, closes it down.

Same switch trips every time

Consistency helps. The device doing the work names the fault type before any test: a breaker answers to current, a residual device to earth leakage, an RCBO to both. After that it is a question of what sits behind it and what gets plugged into it.

Kettle keeps tripping the electrics

A kettle element spends its whole life submerged, and once it starts passing current to earth the trip arrives seconds after the switch goes down. We test the kettle away from the installation, then check whether that circuit was already carrying enough leakage for the kettle to finish the job.

You'll get a straight answer on what failed and why. Most jobs are put right the same day; anything waiting on parts is made safe first and booked in.