Emergency Electrical Repair in Los Altos, CA

Look at the neighbors and the road first. Los Altos Hills loses power to line problems and PSPS shutoffs often enough that a wide outage is normally PG&E's to restore. If yours is the only dark house, the fault is on your side — and on a multi-acre parcel that frequently means the long underground run between the road and the house, or a connection at the meter, not anything inside your walls.

It is worth treating as urgent, especially heading into a multi-day outage or a PSPS window. The failure is usually one of three things: the automatic transfer switch not sensing the outage or not transferring, the generator's own start or battery circuit, or the feed between them. We test the transfer sequence rather than guessing — and if the fault is inside the generator itself, we will tell you that instead of billing electrical time on a mechanical problem.

That is the signature Los Altos remodel fault. Homes here have usually been added onto, and the addition is fed from a subpanel — in a garage, a closet, a pool equipment room, sometimes outside — with its own breakers and its own feeder. When the main panel looks untouched and a whole section is dark, the failure is nearly always a tripped feeder or a loose lug in that subpanel. Finding all of them is the first thing we do.

No, get it looked at. Flickering and dimming on a long private run usually means a loose or corroding connection somewhere in that run, and loose connections generate heat before they fail outright. If the dimming happens in one part of the house while lights elsewhere brighten, that is a different and more urgent problem — a lost neutral, which can push well over 120V onto circuits and damage electronics. Shut off sensitive equipment and call.

It depends on the address. Work in the City of Los Altos is permitted and inspected by the city; Los Altos Hills addresses go through the Town of Los Altos Hills. Emergency work to make the house safe proceeds either way, and a like-for-like replacement generally needs no permit — but a panel replacement or new circuits do, and we pull and close out the right one for your parcel.

No. A Public Safety Power Shutoff is PG&E de-energizing its own lines, and only PG&E restores them. What we can do during one is verify a standby generator or transfer switch, and afterward check for damage from the surge when power returns.

Fox Electric covers the town too, but the paperwork is separate: Los Altos Hills has its own Building Department at 26379 Fremont Road (permits@losaltoshills.ca.gov, 650-941-7222) and its own eTRAKiT, so a panel replaced after an emergency there is permitted with the town, not with the City of Los Altos.