Burning smell, smoke or melted cables: emergency electrician in Seville, Spain

Safety first

If you notice a smell of burnt plastic, see smoke coming from a socket (outlet), a box or the fuse board, or find a melted cable, follow these steps before anything else:

1. Switch off the main switch at the fuse board (consumer unit), if you can reach it without going through the smoke.
2. Do not touch the affected socket, appliance or cable.
3. Do not throw water on anything that may be live.
4. If there are flames, leave the room, close the door and call 112.
5. Ventilate once there is no active smoke and wait for us to arrive.

This is the electrical fault where waiting is least advisable. A burning smell is the sign that something is reaching a temperature the material cannot withstand.

Where the burning smell usually comes from

• An overloaded socket. Power strips with several powerful appliances, heaters or portable air conditioners on a general-purpose socket. If the problem is just the socket, see sockets not working.
• A loose terminal. In sockets, switches, junction boxes or the fuse board itself. A bad contact generates heat without needing much load.
• A cable with too small a cross-section. When an old circuit feeds appliances it was not designed for, the cable heats up along its whole length.
• An intermittent short circuit. Two conductors touching now and then cause arcs that burn the insulation. See short circuit.
• The fuse board. Burnt terminals, breakers working at their limit or corroded busbars. See fuse board fault.
• An appliance. The motor or heating element of an appliance also smells when it burns, and in that case the fault is in the appliance, not in the installation.

A smell with no tripping is the warning sign

Many people expect a protection to drop if something is wrong. A burning smell with nothing tripped is precisely what should worry you: it means a cable or a connection is overheating without the circuit breaker (MCB) cutting out. If a breaker does trip at the same time, read MCB keeps tripping; if it is the RCD with the TEST button, read RCD keeps tripping. Either way, with a smell present, the main switch stays off until we have checked it.

How we find the source and repair it

1. We keep the installation switched off while we check the suspect points.
2. We inspect visually sockets, boxes, light fittings and the fuse board, looking for marks, deformation or melted plastic.
3. We measure the insulation of the circuits to know whether the heat has damaged the cable beyond the visible point.
4. We replace what is damaged: switches, sockets, joints and the whole affected length of cable, with the right cross-section for the circuit.
5. We check the protections, because a cable that melts without anything tripping shows the breaker does not match the cable. ITC-BT-22 of the Spanish Low Voltage Electrotechnical Regulation requires every circuit to be protected against overloads and short circuits, and ITC-BT-19 sets out how indoor installations must be built.
6. We restore power only when everything has been checked, and on fuse boards that have overheated we can complete the inspection with a thermal imaging camera.

Why it happens so often in Seville’s older homes

A large share of the flats in Seville city were built between the 1960s and 1980s, in neighbourhoods such as La Macarena, Nervión, Los Remedios or Triana, and in the houses of the city centre the installations can be even older. They were designed for very few appliances. Today they carry air conditioning, a water heater, an induction hob and plenty of electronics. The case we see most in summer: a cable on an old line feeding the living room air conditioning heats up every day for weeks, the insulation dries out and one night the smell appears in the hallway junction box.

If we find several points that have overheated, the responsible thing is to tell you: rather than repairing socket by socket, it is worth considering rewiring the apartment.

How much it costs

There is no single price, because it depends on what has been damaged. As a market reference, an out-of-hours emergency call-out costs 100 to 200 euros plus materials, and during working hours 50 to 100 euros, in both cases plus 21 % VAT.

Replacing a burnt socket is a small repair; replacing a length of cable or rebuilding a fuse board is not. In every case we explain what we have found and give you the price before repairing.

We help at any hour

A burning smell is one of the emergencies we prioritise in our 24-hour emergency electrician service. When you call we give you an estimated time and guide you to make the home safe in the meantime. You can see the other faults we handle on the emergency electrician page.