What to look for in an emergency electrician

Now most of the time, the electrics that comprise your home will suffer no problems that are so dire they need addressing immediately. However sometimes life throws the unexpected at us. After all, if we as a species struggle to even detect early stages of pregnancy then how are we supposed to be able to predict when our circuit breaker will pack up and leave the entire house in darkness with no resolution?  Well there are several ways to resolve this, you can wait it out until a better time to call a regular on call electrician to come out and help, but what if your water heater and kettle for your morning coffee is powered by electricity? Then the chances are that you will need to find an emergency callout electrician to come and resolve whatever issue is leaving you without power or other facilities in your home.

If you have never had the experience of calling an emergency electrician then the experience can be summed up with the analogy that you make one phone call and you may as well open up a new account with your credit card for them. Callout fees for jobs, particularly those that occur at late night or at last minute’s notice can incur significant fees before they will even get out of bed to come and look at your problem. So when you are paying these potentially astronomical fees, you want to ensure that the electrician you choose is of high quality and can complete the work to your satisfaction. But what are the key indicators of this? Let’s talk through some of the things you should be looking out for.

Reputation

With the advent of the internet in recent history, nowadays you find that word travels fast, particularly when it comes to businesses and how well they perform the advertised job. If somebody is delighted with a service then as a point of being a good customer and appreciative of their service, they will leave a great review extolling exactly why you should choose them and what it was about their service that made them come out and write their review. However as the coin spins for people who do good work at reasonable costs, it will bottom out for those who overcharge for bad services and products, and electricians do not escape this all-encompassing philosophy and the effects that these kinds of review can have on a business is devastating, which in a way helps encourage contractors to do better work.

However, due to the emergency nature of the service that you are looking for it can be hard or impractical to put a huge amount of time into researching and reviewing reviews but it is something that you will want to do as there is one additional caveat to this process. An electrician who knows that you are in an emergency, definitely has the capacity to run around you in terms of price, with less reputable electrical contractors even being accused of holding it over their customers in order to gain a higher callout charge. To see if anyone has experienced a problem like this before, it can be worth checking out to ensure that the contractor you intend on using is not one of those and is a genuine, trustable trader.

Callout fees

Unfortunately, this area of the process is not so cut and dry, technically speaking from a legal standpoint, a contractor is free to charge whatever they think is acceptable for their services and while there are some commonly understood guidelines when it comes to regular work that most tradies will follow, the guidelines that exist around so called “emergency” work are slightly less cut and dry. This causes quite a level of distrust in the fees that are charged merely for their presence. And it’s important that you have these explained BEFORE your chosen tradesman comes out to see you.

If at all possible get a direct quote from them and a receipt for their callout fee’s just in case they try to dispute what you originally agreed was a reasonable callout fee, as unfortunately, unless you get that written receipt there is no proof that you have paid anything. You may click the following link for more information about emergency electricians.