This page is the front door for all of it. Every question below is one somebody has said out loud on the phone, answered straight, with the part you can safely check yourself kept separate from the part that needs a licensed electrician. Each answer ends by naming where it goes, because there are two different kinds of visit and asking for the wrong one costs you a day. Something that used to work and has stopped is a service call. Something the house does not have yet is a free on-site estimate.
American Electrical Services is the electrical division of American Rooter & Drain and holds Idaho Electrical Contractor License LIC# 3671445 in its own right. The electrical line is (208) 782-8268.
Why does my breaker keep tripping?
Because it is doing the job it was installed to do. A breaker is a switch built to open when the circuit behind it carries more current than the wire can safely handle, or when current starts leaving that circuit by a route it should not be taking. A breaker that trips is not the fault. It is the alarm.
Before you call, watch the pattern, because you are the only one standing there when it happens. Three observations do the sorting:
- What was running at the moment it went. Space heater, microwave, hair dryer, window air conditioner, shop compressor, the vacuum sharing a run with the toaster. If the trip tracks one appliance, that circuit is being asked for more than it was built to give, and the answer is either moving the appliance or giving it a circuit of its own.
- Whether it goes instantly or after a while. Instantly, every single time you reset it, means something is faulted right now and the circuit should be left off until somebody traces it. After ten or twenty minutes under load points at heat building somewhere — a connection that has loosened, turned resistive, and warms until the breaker reacts.
- What else went dark with it. One room, several rooms, or half the house are three different jobs with three different answers. That one detail sorts a call faster than anything else you can tell us.
Two mechanical points worth knowing before you touch the panel. First, a tripped breaker does not always look tripped. The handle can sit halfway, close enough to its neighbors that nothing stands out. To reset one properly you push it firmly all the way to OFF first, then back to ON — skip the OFF and it will feel like a breaker that refuses to reset. Second, look at the face of the breaker itself. If there is a small TEST button on it, that is a GFCI or an AFCI breaker, and those are watching for entirely different things — current leaking off the circuit, or arcing inside it — rather than for heat and overload. Telling us which kind moved changes the conversation before anyone gets in a truck.
The rule that overrides all of it: reset it once. If it will not hold, leave it off. Forcing a breaker back on into a live fault overrules the one part of the system that is currently working. This is a service call — electrical repair covers what gets tested on site and in what order.
Why did one outlet stop working?
Because something upstream of it opened. Power reaches a receptacle through a chain of connections running back to the panel, and any link in that chain can fail while leaving everything before it live and everything after it dead. The dead outlet is not necessarily the failed part, which is exactly why buying a new receptacle and swapping it in changes nothing and costs you an evening.
Before you book anything, three checks are worth five minutes:
1. Plug in a lamp you know works. Not the thing that stopped — that is two unknowns at once.
2. Walk the house pressing RESET on every GFCI you can find. Those are the receptacles with two small buttons in the face, marked TEST and RESET. A GFCI protects everything downstream of it on the wire, and wire does not respect walls: the reset that brings a bedroom outlet back can sit in a garage, a bathroom, a laundry room, outside under a weatherproof cover, or down in a crawlspace. Press all of them, not only the ones in the room that went dead. Check the panel too — a breaker with a TEST button on it is doing the same job from the other end.
3. Try the wall switches in that room. Half of a receptacle being controlled by a wall switch is a wiring pattern in its own right, put there deliberately for a floor lamp. Somebody taped that switch off years ago and nobody has needed it since.
What the result tells you. If a GFCI resets and holds, the fault was momentary or it lived inside whatever was plugged in, and you are finished. If it will not hold, or it trips again the same day, something on that protected run is leaking current and it needs tracing. If nothing anywhere resets and the breaker is sound, the break is in a connection nobody can see — a wire that pulled loose from the spring hole in the back of a device somewhere else on the run, a wire nut that let go inside a junction box, or a cable nicked behind drywall during a remodel. That last one is the part of the job that takes real time, and it is why the visit starts at the panel rather than at the outlet you are standing in front of.
One thing overrides the whole list. An outlet that is warm, browned, buzzing or smells hot is not a troubleshooting exercise — skip ahead to the burning-smell answer below. Otherwise, this is a service call — electrical repair.
Why do my lights flicker?
Count how many lights do it at once, because that number tells you which of three places the problem lives in.
One bulb, or one fixture. This is the lane where the cause may not be your wiring at all, and where you may be able to end it yourself this evening. There is one cause here that catches people out: an LED bulb on a dimmer built for incandescent. An older dimmer needs a minimum load flowing through it to hold steady, and an LED draws so little that the dimmer never settles — so it stutters, flutters, or refuses to travel smoothly down the bottom of the slider. A dimmer marked LED-compatible ends it, and so does respecting the minimum bulb count printed in that dimmer's own instructions. Failing either, check the plain things: a bulb backed a half-turn out of its socket, or a socket contact flattened with age that no longer presses on the base.
Every light on one circuit, or one whole room. That is a connection somewhere on that run doing the same thing a warm switch does — heating, opening slightly, closing again. It is not something to live alongside, because a connection that intermittently opens under load is a connection getting worse rather than better. Service call.
The whole house at once. Move on this one. Whole-house flicker, or lights brightening in one part of the house while they dim in another, points past any single circuit and at the service feeding the building. Call the same day rather than booking ahead.
And the one that is not a fault at all: a brief, shallow dip the instant a large motor starts — furnace blower, well pump, air conditioning compressor, garbage disposal — is ordinary physics. Those pull a big inrush current for a fraction of a second as they get moving. What turns it into a real symptom is the dip being deep, taking a beat to recover, worsening across months, or showing up on circuits nowhere near the appliance.
Anything past the dimmer is a service call — electrical repair.
I smell something burning near an outlet — what do I do?
Stop using that circuit right now, then call rather than book online. In order:
1. Unplug whatever is on it and leave it unplugged.
2. Switch the circuit off at the breaker. If you cannot work out which breaker it is, the single large switch at the top of the panel kills the whole house. A dark house is a safe house, and that is a short inconvenience measured against the alternative.
3. Do not plug something else in to see whether it does it too. That is a test that can only confirm what you already know, using your house to run it.
4. Call. A booking form gives you a confirmation email. It does not give you a person who can ask the next question.
5. If you see smoke or flame, or the smell strengthens after the circuit is off, that is the fire department rather than an electrician. Get everyone out and call 911 first. We come afterwards.
It helps to know what you are actually smelling. The insulation on the conductors, the body of the receptacle and the plate around it are all thermoplastic, and heated past their working temperature they give off a sharp chemical smell — nearer to hot fish or a melting crayon than to burnt toast. That smell means a connection has been running hot long enough to cook the plastic around it. The plastic is the part holding the conductors apart from each other and from everything else inside the wall, and heat is a symptom that does not improve on its own.
Four details help when you call: which room, whether anything has gone brown, shiny or distorted around the slots, whether the breaker for that circuit tripped on its own, and whether the smell fades once the power to it is off. If it fades with the circuit dead, we know we are looking at that circuit. This is a service call, and it is the one on this page that gets booked by voice.
Why is my light switch warm?
Whether warm is normal depends entirely on one thing: is it a dimmer, or a plain switch?
A dimmer is supposed to run warm. A dimmer works by refusing to pass part of the power on to the lights, and that energy has to go somewhere — it leaves as heat, through the metal strap of the device and out into the cover plate. A dimmer carrying a real load and feeling warm under your fingers is doing what it was designed to do. What is not normal is hot. The thing that turns warm into too hot is crowding: dimmers ganged three and four deep in one box with the break-off fins on their sides snapped away so they would fit. Those fins are heat sink. A dimmer's own instructions state a lower wattage rating once they are removed, and a bank installed at full rating with the fins gone is a box running hotter than any single device in it was ever rated for.
A plain toggle or rocker switch should be at room temperature. There is nothing inside one designed to make heat — it closes a contact and that is the whole job. Warm means resistance where there should be none, and there are only a few places for that to be: a conductor pushed into the spring hole in the back of the device instead of wrapped under the screw terminal, and now relaxed; a terminal screw that was never fully tightened; contacts worn out inside the switch after decades of use; or an aluminum conductor landed on a device not rated to accept one.
Two observations sharpen it further. Warm only while the light is on is a load-related connection problem. Warm, or buzzing, while the light is off is the worse of the two, because it means something is happening on that circuit with no load to explain it. And a warm switch plate combined with any smell at all belongs in the previous answer rather than this one.
Either way the action is the same: stop using that switch, turn the circuit off at the panel, and book a service call — electrical repair.
Do I need an electrician or can I fix this myself?
There is a short list of things worth doing yourself, and a clear line past it — and the line is not drawn by how handy you are.
Do these first, on your own:
- Press RESET on every GFCI in the house before booking a dead-outlet call.
- Reset a breaker once, firmly to OFF and back to ON.
- Change a bulb, or tighten one that has backed out of its socket.
- Put an LED-compatible bulb and dimmer combination in place of one that is fighting.
- Press the small reset button on the underside of a garbage disposal that hums but will not turn.
- Look up the street before deciding your power is out.
Then check that it is even an electrician you want:
- The whole street is dark. That is the utility. Everything from the transformer to the meter belongs to the power company; everything from the meter inward is ours. An electrician cannot restore utility power, and you should not be paying one to come and tell you that.
- Your house is dark and the neighbors are lit. That sits on our side of the meter — the main breaker, the service, or a connection between them. Call.
- The furnace or the air conditioner will not start. Start with heating and cooling. A thermostat or a control board is the first place that gets checked, and neither is an electrician's part. The exception is clean: if the breaker feeding that equipment is tripping, come to us first.
- An electric water heater has gone cold. Elements and thermostats fail on their own schedule, independently of the circuit feeding them. Unless a breaker is tripping, that is a water heater call.
- You rent. The wiring belongs to the building and so does the decision about it. Tell us on the phone who owns the place, so the work gets authorized and invoiced to the right party rather than sorted out afterwards.
Past that list, the line is about what the work has to be done under rather than whether you could physically manage it. Anything that opens a device, extends a circuit, or lands a conductor on a breaker is licensed work. Where a permit is required, Idaho will issue one to a homeowner doing the work personally in their own home, or to a licensed contractor — and to nobody in between. Work that needed a permit and never got one is still there at closing, and it is the buyer's inspector who goes looking for it.
One thing overrides every item above, at any skill level: heat, a burning smell, buzzing, browning, sparking, or a shock of any size from a switch plate, an appliance or a faucet. None of that is a do-it-yourself item. Turn it off and call (208) 782-8268.
What does an electrician charge?
For the visit where somebody comes out and looks at it, nothing. The on-site estimate is free, and you pay only if you approve the work.
That is not a promotion, it is the only honest way to price this trade, because the number is set by things nobody can see from the driveway. Standing in your house, an electrician is working through three questions:
- Can a circuit that already exists carry this, or does a new one have to leave the panel? That is the single biggest fork in any electrical price.
- What is between the panel and the place the power has to end up? Both ends of a run are the fast part. The middle is the job. Twenty feet through a walkable attic above an unfinished garage and twenty feet through a plaster-and-lath ceiling under blown-in insulation are the same distance on a floor plan and two completely different afternoons.
- What did the last person who worked in there leave behind? Devices back-stabbed throughout, a circuit extended and re-extended by a series of different hands, aluminum branch wiring, or an addition that was never permitted all change what the job actually is.
Whatever those add up to becomes one flat number, put in writing before anything is opened up. It is a price for the job rather than an hourly rate, so it cannot climb while somebody is up in your attic — a job that runs longer than expected is our problem rather than yours. The only thing that moves a number you have approved is additional work you agree to first. There is more on why we won't quote a price over the phone.
The free look is the ordinary thing here rather than the exception. Of 354 electrical appointments booked on this schedule, 193 went on the calendar as an estimate visit rather than as a repair call — coming out to look at it is the most common electrical appointment we book.
The estimate side is also where everything the house does not have yet lives, and each of those has a page of its own: a panel with no space left in it and panel upgrades, a charging circuit for a car and EV charger installation, staying on through an outage and generator installation, more light over the island or the back steps and lighting installation. If it is a shop, an office or a restaurant rather than a house, start at commercial electrical service. If the house is on the older end, there is a guide to what turns up in older Idaho homes.
Which towns do you cover?
Idaho: Boise · Meridian · Nampa · Caldwell · Eagle · Star · Kuna · Middleton · Garden City · Hidden Springs · Mountain Home · Emmett · Marsing · Homedale · Parma · Wilder · Payette · Fruitland · Weiser
Those are the towns with pages of their own. Completed electrical work reaches further than that list does — 23 towns in all — and four of them have no page here: New Plymouth (9 completed electrical jobs), Greenleaf (3), Melba (2) and Midvale (1). If your town appears on neither list, call and ask before assuming — the trucks go further than the site does.
American Electrical Services is an Idaho DBA of American Rooter & Drain (ABN 0006889156) and holds Idaho Electrical Contractor License LIC# 3671445 in its own right — the same ownership and the same standards as the plumbing side, with its own brand and its own phone line. American Rooter & Drain has worked in the greater Treasure Valley since 1945 and runs out of 1005 Commercial Way in Caldwell; its main line is (208) 366-5771. For anything electrical, call (208) 782-8268, or start at the electrical services overview.
If you have read this far and still cannot name what is wrong, call anyway and describe it in whatever words you have. Working out what it is called is our job, not yours.
