24/7 Emergency Electrician in Denver

What counts as a real electrical emergency

Not every electrical problem needs someone at your door tonight. A dead outlet in a bedroom can wait until morning. The list below cannot — if any of these describe what is happening, stop reading and call (303) 257-5716.

• A burning smell. Hot plastic, fish, or an acrid electrical smell with no obvious source is overheating insulation. It is the single most common warning before a fire.
• A sparking outlet, switch or panel. A brief spark when unplugging something is normal. Sparks that arc, repeat, or come from inside the wall or the panel are not.
• A dead panel. No power anywhere in the house while the neighbors still have theirs means the failure is on your side of the meter.
• Partial power loss across the house. Half the outlets dead, lights dimming and surging, or 120V circuits behaving strangely often means a lost neutral or a failing service connection. This can damage every appliance in the house and it gets worse, not better.
• Water contact with wiring. A burst pipe, a roof leak, a flooded basement or a sprinkler discharge anywhere near outlets, a panel or a light fixture.
• Exposed or damaged wiring. A downed service line, a mast pulled loose from the roof, wiring chewed by rodents, or a cable damaged during other work.
• Repeated breaker trips. A breaker that trips once may have seen a genuine overload. A breaker that trips again immediately after you reset it is telling you there is a fault on that circuit. Stop resetting it.
• Anything hot to the touch — an outlet cover, a switch plate, a panel door or a cord at the plug.

When in doubt, call and describe it. We would far rather talk you through something that turns out to be minor than read about it in the morning.

What to do before the electrician arrives

Stay calm and work in this order. None of it requires tools or electrical knowledge.

1. Decide whether to leave

If you see flames, see smoke, or the burning smell is strong and getting stronger, leave the property and call 911 first. Everything below is for situations where there is no active fire. A house is replaceable and the fire department will not mind being called.

2. Shut off the main breaker if it is safe to reach

Your main breaker is the largest single breaker at the top or bottom of the panel, usually labeled 100 or 200. Stand to the side of the panel rather than directly in front of it, keep one hand in your pocket, make sure you are not standing in water, and push the handle firmly to OFF. That kills power to the whole house. If the panel itself is sparking, smoking, buzzing loudly, hot, or standing in water — do not touch it. Leave it, get clear and tell us on the phone.

3. If you cannot kill the main, kill the circuit

Turn off the individual breaker feeding the affected room or appliance and leave it off. Do not reset a breaker that has tripped on a fault.

4. What not to touch

• Do not touch a downed or damaged service line, ever, and keep everyone well away from it.
• Do not stand in water to reach anything electrical.
• Do not pour water on an electrical fire.
• Do not pull a plug out of an outlet that is sparking or scorched — kill the breaker first.
• Do not remove the panel cover.
• Do not put a larger breaker or a penny-style fix into a circuit that keeps tripping.
• Do not run extension cords from a neighbor's house or a generator into your panel.

5. Make it easy for us to work

Clear a path to the panel, put pets in another room, and turn the porch light on if the power is still up. If you know what was running when it happened — a space heater, a window AC, a hot tub, a new appliance — tell us. It usually points straight at the circuit.

Response times

Denver is our home base, so calls inside Denver proper are usually on site within 60 to 90 minutes, day or night. Across the south metro — Littleton, Aurora, Centennial, Highlands Ranch and Lakewood — expect 60 to 120 minutes. Parker, Castle Pines and Castle Rock typically run 90 minutes to two hours. Those are honest working numbers, not marketing promises: a heavy storm night with widespread outages stretches everyone, and if we are going to be longer than we said, you will hear it from us rather than wonder.

Whatever the drive time, the phone call happens immediately, and the make-safe advice starts on that call.

What an emergency call costs

Emergency and diagnostic visits fall in our published $180 to $900 range. Where you land inside it depends on the hour, the complexity of the fault and how much tracing it takes to find. A straightforward after-hours diagnosis on a single circuit sits near the bottom; a multi-hour hunt for an intermittent fault across an older house, or a make-safe on a damaged service, sits higher.

Two things we commit to. First, you are told the fee on the phone before we dispatch — there is no surprise number at the door. Second, the diagnostic fee is credited toward the repair when you have us do the work. If the fix is quick, it frequently gets absorbed entirely. Any repair beyond the diagnosis gets a price before we start it.

What we handle on an emergency call

• Make-safe: isolating the fault, killing the affected circuits and securing damaged wiring or a damaged service.
• Full and partial outage diagnosis, including lost neutrals and failing service connections.
• Panel failures, burnt bus bars, failed main breakers and overheated terminations.
• Storm and water damage response, including masts pulled off the roof.
• Temporary power so heat, refrigeration or a sump pump keeps running overnight.
• Commercial failures — three-phase distribution, dead subpanels, lost refrigeration and life-safety circuits.

Emergency electrician by city

We respond across the south metro. For local detail on permits, housing stock and drive times, see emergency electrician in Castle Rock, emergency electrician in Littleton, emergency electrician in Aurora and emergency electrician in Parker.

After the emergency

A lot of night calls end with the same conclusion: the panel or the service is at the end of its life. If that is yours, read about panel and service upgrades and the panel upgrade cost in Denver. For everything that is not urgent, our general electrical service covers troubleshooting, repairs and device work on a scheduled visit.