Emergency Electrical Repair in Los Gatos, CA

If the outage covers the road and your neighbors, it is PG&E's line work and we cannot shorten it. Call us when your house is the only dark one, when power comes back and part of the house stays dead, or when something arced, sparked, or smells burnt during the event — surges and wind damage do leave real faults behind on the customer side, particularly on long hillside service runs.

That is the most common downtown Los Gatos emergency and it should be taken seriously. In homes from the 1890s to the 1920s the cause is usually an arcing splice or a failing connection where cloth insulation has gone brittle inside a box, a fixture, or a switch. Turn off the breaker for that area and leave it off, then let us scan with a thermal imager to find the hot spot before any plaster gets opened.

Treat it as urgent, especially during storm season. The usual culprits are the automatic transfer switch failing to sense the outage or to transfer, the generator's start and battery circuit, or the feeder between them. We test the transfer sequence to identify which stage failed instead of guessing — and if the problem is mechanical inside the generator, we will say so rather than charge electrical time against it.

If there is smoke, a burning smell, or visible arcing, shut off the main if you can reach it safely and stay away from the panel. Leave the affected breakers off rather than resetting them repeatedly. If you can, turn on an exterior light or have someone at the driveway — unlit mountain and Shannon Hills driveways are the single most common reason a night call takes longer than the estimate we gave you on the phone.

It depends where the house sits. Inside town limits the Town of Los Gatos permits and inspects the work; unincorporated addresses in the mountains go through Santa Clara County. Emergency work to make the property safe happens first either way, and a like-for-like replacement generally needs no permit — a panel replacement or new circuits do, and we pull and close out whichever applies.

The Town's wildfire preparedness page states that southern Los Gatos is in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone and points residents to PG&E's PSPS program for shutoff notices. Homes in that zone are where a standby generator or battery with a transfer switch pays off, and those need a Town or County permit before the event, not after.

Call us for the fault; the jurisdiction only matters for the follow-up permit. Unincorporated Los Gatos Mountains addresses are permitted and inspected by the Santa Clara County Department of Planning and Development (408-299-5700, 70 W. Hedding St., San Jose), not by the Town.