Emergency Electrical Repair in Western Chicagoland

Yes, and it matters for who you call and how fast. This page is for electrical faults inside the property when utility power is still available on the street — burning smells at outlets, half the house dark while the other half is lit, a breaker that trips the moment it's reset, sparking at a fixture, or storm damage to the service mast. If your standby generator itself is failing to start, transferring, or running, that's a different service call. See our emergency generator repair page (linked below) — the diagnostic tools and parts are different.

Call immediately — before you finish reading this — if you smell burning plastic near an outlet or panel, see visible sparks or arcing, hear buzzing from the panel, feel heat on a cover plate or breaker, or have any smoke. Same for a downed service line or a panel that has been contacted by water. Call within 24 hours for a breaker that trips repeatedly under normal load, an outlet that stopped working after a pop or spark, or partial loss of power in one area of the home with no obvious cause. Routine dead-outlet troubleshooting can be scheduled normally.

If safe to do so, turn off the main breaker to de-energize the property. Do not attempt to reset a breaker that has tripped after a burning smell, sparking, or a pop — trip protection means something failed, and repeatedly resetting can restart the fault. Keep everyone away from any downed line on your property and call your utility (ComEd) to report it in addition to calling us. If water is involved, do not enter a room with visible pooling near outlets or the panel until we or the fire department clear it.

The classic cause is a lost 'leg' — one of the two 120-volt phases feeding your panel has been interrupted, usually at the utility drop, the meter, the main breaker, or a neutral connection. Half the 120V circuits stay live, half go dead, and 240V loads (dryer, range, HVAC, generator transfer switch) misbehave. This is not a DIY reset situation. It can also present as lights that brighten and dim strangely as loads switch on and off — that's a failing neutral and is genuinely dangerous to sensitive electronics. Turn off the main and call.

No. A breaker that trips immediately on reset is doing its job — there's a fault on the circuit, and swapping the breaker is how house fires start. The fault could be a shorted appliance, a pinched cable, water in a junction box, a nail through a wire from a picture hanger, or a failed device. Diagnosis takes 30–90 minutes with the right tools; the fix depends on what we find. Call for the diagnostic — don't gamble with a new breaker.

The service mast, weather head, and meter socket on the exterior of your home are the homeowner's responsibility; the drop wire from the pole to the mast is ComEd's. When both are damaged, ComEd disconnects the drop and we rebuild the mast, weather head, and meter socket to code. Once we've passed inspection, ComEd reconnects. We coordinate the full sequence — call us first, we open the ticket with ComEd.

For true emergencies (smell, spark, water, downed line, whole- or partial-property outage), our target on-site window is under two hours during business hours and under four hours overnight in Western Suburbs. We publish honest windows — no 'we'll be there soon' with no follow-up. If a legitimate emergency is going to take longer than that because of storm-wide demand, we tell you when we call back so you can make an informed decision.