Emergency Electrician in Shapleigh, Maine

In a town where power lines run through thick woods, the most common electrical emergency after a storm is a service mast pulled off the house. A limb catches the overhead drop, the weatherhead bends or snaps, and the meter socket can tear loose from the wall. Central Maine Power owns the line up to the weatherhead and the meter; the mast, the meter socket and everything on the house side belong to the homeowner and are repaired by the homeowner's electrician. The utility will not reconnect a service until that equipment is fixed, so both sides have to be coordinated.

If you see a wire on the ground, treat it as live. Keep people and pets well back, call 911, and report it to Central Maine Power at 800-696-1000. Do not try to lift it off a car, a fence or a tree. Inside the house, warning signs of a fault include an outlet or switch that is hot, sparks when something is plugged in, a smell of burning plastic, flickering that follows no pattern, or a main breaker that trips again immediately. Any of those is worth a call, day or night. A panel that has gone dead in a single room or the whole house also qualifies. If only some circuits are dead after a storm, or lights brighten and dim as appliances cycle, the cause may be a damaged neutral, which can send abnormal voltage to electronics; unplug what you can and call.

Seasonal buildings add their own emergencies. A camp on Mousam Lake that sat empty all winter may reveal chewed wiring, water in a fixture box or a failed heater circuit when it is opened in spring, and an unheated building that lost power in January can hide ice damage to equipment. Goodnow Electric provides 24/7 emergency service. The priority on arrival is to make the building safe, isolate what is damaged and restore power to the rest where it can be done safely, then put the permanent repair in writing. When a camp has been without power for weeks, have the heating and water heater circuits checked before everything is switched on at once.