If the power suddenly goes off when you are with your client, you may automatically think that the power ‘has tripped.’

What has happened is that the circuit has been overloaded and in order to protect the electrical system in the house, a circuit breaker will switch the power off until you have sorted out the reason.

What to do?

Locate the circuit breaker box. You may also know this as the fuse box. Normally you will find it near the front door. Look in a cupboard under the stairs as sometimes they are placed there.

Inside you will see a row of switches which all should be in the same position. The breaker which has switched off should be easy to spot as it will be pointing the opposite way to all the others.

You can simply push the switch back into the right position so that it looks the same as the others. You may hear a click as it resets itself. Hopefully the power should come back on.

Once you have isolated the source of the trip you may want to investigate the reason. If the power trips out again, you will need to assume that something in the house is causing it – as opposed to a general power surge. 

What is causing the outage?

You can try to unplug all the appliances, reset the breaker, and then plug them in again, one at a time. This will give you an idea of which appliance is the issue.

The most common cause of power outages in the home are overloaded circuits. This means that somewhere there are too many items plugged into the same socket.

In older houses where there are fewer sockets, you may often find that there are several adaptors with items all plugged into one plug hole. This may well be where the problem arises.

There are some things that you can do to prevent an overload:

• Plug fewer things into the same socket. The tv, stereo, and two lamps may be too many for one socket. You should move one or two of them elsewhere.
• Turn off any devices which are not in use. This will save power and mean less stress on the circuit.
• Check for any loose connections in the outlets. Not only can this short circuit things but it can also cause a fire.

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