No power, sparks, or a burning smell in Jacksonville

Three things in a house are an electrical emergency: a burning smell or heat at the panel, an outlet or switch that sparked or scorched, and power that is out on your side of the meter while the neighbors have theirs. Everything else, including a single dead circuit, can wait for morning. Knowing which is which is most of what this page is for.

Call and get connected with an independent local electrical contractor who serves your part of Duval, St. Johns, Clay or Nassau. Say what the house is doing (dark, half dark, tripping, smell, sparks), what you already switched off, and whether the neighbors have power; that is enough for the contractor to decide what to bring.

Before the contractor arrives

Three things you can do yourself, with dry hands and dry feet. Nothing else.

• A burning smell, a hot breaker or panel cover, buzzing or crackling from the panel: switch the main breaker off if you can reach it without touching anything hot or wet, leave it off, and call. Do not remove the panel cover; the terminals behind it are live even with the main off.
• One breaker tripped: reset it once, one try. If it trips again, leave it off and tell the contractor which one. A breaker that keeps tripping is protecting an overloaded circuit, a fault, or is failing itself; a bigger breaker on the same wire is not a fix.
• The whole house is dark: look outside. If the neighbors are dark too, report the outage to JEA, Beaches Energy, Clay Electric or FPL and wait. If the neighbors have power, the fault is at your meter, your main, or your panel, and that is the call.
• Do not use an extension cord to feed a circuit from another one, back-feed the house from a portable generator through a dryer outlet, or open the meter can. Back-feeding puts power on the utility's lines and can kill a lineman.

What usually causes it here

The same few things take a First Coast house down, and most of them are repairs.

• A failed breaker, or a Federal Pacific or Zinsco breaker that never tripped when it should have and cooked its bus bar: the 1950s-to-1980s houses of Arlington, Mandarin, Southside and Orange Park.
• A loose neutral or a corroded connection at the meter or the main: lights that brighten in one room and dim in another, a symptom that needs the utility and the contractor on the same day.
• Aluminum branch wiring from 1965 to 1973 failing at a receptacle or a switch: warmth at the cover plate, a smell of hot plastic, a device that stops working.
• Water: a flooded panel in a garage on the riverfront or the Beaches after a storm, a meter can full of salt corrosion on the island streets, a buried feeder that finally shorted.
• A surge from a lightning strike or a utility fault that took out the main, the GFCI breakers, or the electronics; the 2020 code's surge protector on the service is written for this.

What the contractor does

Diagnosis first: voltage at the meter and the main, the condition of the bus bar and the breakers, the neutral and ground connections, thermal reading on anything warm. A repair on the same visit is possible if the part is on the truck; a panel that has burned, or a Federal Pacific or Zinsco panel that has failed once, is a replacement, and the contractor should say so with the permit on the quote.

A panel that sat in river or ocean water is replaced, not dried out; the contractor sets the new one at the elevation Jacksonville's floodplain rule requires, two feet above base flood elevation inside the city.