No electricity in your apartment? Electrician in Seville, Spain for power cuts at home

First: is it your home or the whole street?

When you have no electricity in your apartment, the key question is whether only you are affected or everyone around you. Look out onto the landing, check the windows across the street or ask a neighbour:

• The whole neighbourhood or building is dark. It is a network power cut (outage). You do not need an electrician: report it to the distributor, e-distribución, and wait for the repair.
• The neighbours have power and you do not. The fault is in your part of the installation, which runs from your meter to your sockets. That is what this page is about.
• Only the stairwell, the entrance hall or the garage is dark. It is a fault in the common areas of the building, which belong to the comunidad (the owners’ association). See communal electrical faults.

In Spain the company that sends your bill (Endesa, Iberdrola, Naturgy, Octopus and so on) is not the one that owns the cables. If the street is dark, call the distributor; if only your home is dark, call an electrician.

What to check in your fuse board before calling

1. Main switch (IGA). If it is down, push it up. If it drops again straight away, there is a short circuit or a general overload.
2. RCD (diferencial, GFCI in the US). If this is the one that dropped and it will not stay up, there is a current leaking to earth. Read RCD keeps tripping.
3. Circuit breakers (MCBs, magnetotérmicos). If only one area of the home has no power, look for the lever that is down and see MCB keeps tripping.
4. Everything up and still no power. The problem is before the fuse board, in the riser cable (derivación individual) or in the meter room, and nobody but a professional should handle it.

If the power went off when you switched on several appliances and comes back when you switch one off, the smart meter has most likely cut you off for exceeding your contracted power (potencia contratada). We explain it on power limiter tripping.

Why only your home has lost power

• A fault in the riser cable. This is the line that runs from your meter up to the fuse board in your home. A burnt joint, a loose terminal or a damaged cable leaves it without voltage. It is covered by ITC-BT-15 of the Spanish wiring regulations and it is the owner’s responsibility, not the electricity company’s.
• A fault in the meter room. A burnt connection or protection in the building’s meter room (centralización de contadores) can leave a single home dark.
• A faulty fuse board. A main switch that will not reset, a burnt terminal or a damaged busbar. If the fuse board smells or feels hot, see fuse board fault.
• A lost phase. In three-phase installations one of the three phases can fail, leaving only part of the home without power.
• A burnt joint further along. When half the home is dark and the fuse board is fine, there is usually a burnt junction box feeding several rooms.

How we sort it out

1. We measure the voltage at the fuse board to know whether power is reaching your home at all.
2. If it is not, we go back to the source: we check the riser cable and the output of your meter in the meter room.
3. If it is, we follow the circuits until we find the protection, joint or section that has failed.
4. We repair it and check that the installation is left in proper condition, following ITC-BT-17 for the main control and protection devices.

If the fault is in the distributor’s network and not in your installation, we tell you so and explain how to report it, so you do not pay for a repair that is not yours.

Power cuts in the older buildings of Seville

In the traditional shared courtyard houses (casas de vecinos) of Triana and the city centre, and in many blocks in La Macarena or San Pablo, the riser cables and meter rooms are decades old and carry more load every year. A typical August case: several flats switch on the air conditioning at the same time, a terminal on one riser that had been loose for years heats up, burns and leaves a single home in the dark while the rest of the building still has power. We repair the connection and, if the riser is at its limit, explain the options to renew it. In more recent areas such as Sevilla Este a total power cut in one home is less common and is usually down to the fuse board or an appliance. More on the older buildings of Triana and the city centre.

What to do while you wait for the electrician

• Unplug TVs, computers and the router to protect them from the spike when the power comes back.
• Keep the fridge and freezer closed.
• Do not open the meter room or touch cables in the entrance hall.
• If there is a burning smell or smoke, switch off the main switch and let us know, then read burning smell.

We deal with power cuts at any hour through our 24-hour emergency electrician service, and we give you an estimated time when you call. The rest of the faults we handle are on the emergency electrician page.