Electrical
Electrical emergencies can happen at any time. That is why our team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year across Kent and the surrounding counties.
Published response
30minutes
If emergency attendance is requested, an engineer will be dispatched to you within 30 minutes.
The first priority is always to make the installation safe. Then we diagnose the fault properly and tell you what we found.
01 Emergency Electrician
02 Emergency Electrician
The list above is the short version. Anything burning, sparking, wet or live where it should not be is an emergency, because the risk carries on whether or not anyone is in the room. Everything else comes down to whether the fault can be switched off and left alone.
If it can, the danger is already isolated. You have lost the use of a circuit, not the safety of the installation. That is normally a booked visit rather than a callout, done in daylight with the right parts to hand.
If you are weighing it up at midnight and cannot decide, phone us and describe what you can actually see, hear and smell. Working out whether something is safe to leave is our job, not yours.
Things that will usually keep until a normal working day:
03 Emergency Electrician
If there is smoke or flame, that is a 999 call before it is an electrician call. Leave the building first and phone us afterwards. Anyone who has taken a shock should be seen by a doctor even if they feel completely fine.
When you get through to us, what happened before the fault is worth more than the fault itself. Tell us what was switched on, whether it had been raining, and whether anyone had been drilling or decorating. Half of fault finding is a timeline, and you are the only person who has it.
The most useful thing anyone can do in the meantime is take the power away from the problem and then leave it alone. What follows assumes you can reach the consumer unit safely and with dry hands. If you cannot, wait for us.
04 Emergency Electrician
Made safe means the fault traced far enough to isolate it, everything that should be dead proved dead, and everything that should still be live proved live. It is not the repair, and in the early hours it is the honest limit of what can be done.
The permanent repair is then done properly rather than improvised — a cable replaced along its route instead of jointed blind under a floor, a board changed with the right device rather than the nearest one to hand.
Splitting the work in two is not a delay tactic. It is what stops a night-time improvisation turning into a fault next winter. Anything altered on the way to putting it right is tested before it is signed off.
Some faults are not on your side of the meter. The service head, the supply fuse and the meter belong to your distribution network operator and your energy supplier, and they are not ours to work on. Where the fault sits there, we make your side safe and tell you who owns the rest.
05 Emergency Electrician
Out of hours at a let flat or a commercial unit, the electrics are rarely the difficult part. The harder questions are who can open the door, who can authorise the work, and who needs the paperwork afterwards.
Say at the point of the call whether you are the tenant, the landlord, the managing agent or the duty manager, and whether anyone will be on site to let an engineer in. Where the person calling is not the person paying, that is far better established at the kerb than on the invoice.
For business premises, the useful thing to tell us is what must not lose power, because it changes the order the work is done in:
06 On site
Coutts Electrical's own photographs of their own completed installations.
Photographs are Coutts Electrical's own, of their own completed work. Captions name the system type rather than a location, because the images are not tied to a named customer or town.
07 What customers said
Real reviews from the Google profile Coutts Electrical publish on their own site, reproduced word for word.
I had a bank holiday DIY emergency and needed someone to come out and make it safe and get our power back on. Coutts answered and Max was round within a couple of hours. Really easy communication, no hassle and easy to deal with, will definitely be using them for future jobs.
Very efficient service from Max and Alex. They made completing an Electrical Condition Report and then repairs where required in or office seamless and not intrusive at all. Really great for peace of mind. Thank you
Great service and price, Max follows up with paperwork and emails. So pleasant to find a proactive supplier
Very happy with electrical work undertaken by Max of Coutts Electrical, and his team. They installed an electric radiator and new light in the kitchen. They offered advice and were professional and tidy. Would highly recommend.
A fast, efficient, effective, reliable and highly professional company, most recommended.
Excellent and fast work, highly recommended!
Max and his team did a splendid job for usThey took great care to ensure that the right solutions were found and implemented. They completed the tasks on time, dealing with unexpected issues as they arose.Max and the team were friendly, polite, punctual and helpful.Everything was left neat and tidy.As we were unable to use our home until the work was completed we were also grateful that everything was done so quickly
Max responded very quickly to my request to review an electrical fault and efficiently dealt with the issue. I’m delighted that I’ve found Max and will definitely be calling upon him for any future electrical work.
08 Questions
Look outside first. If your neighbours are dark and the street lighting is out too, it is a network fault and there is nothing in your consumer unit that will fix it. The power cut number, 105, is free to call in England, Scotland and Wales, and it puts you through to the distribution network operator for your area. If it is only your property, and the board is somewhere you can reach safely, open it and look at the main switch and the breakers. Everything off points at the incoming supply or the main switch. One breaker off in a board that is otherwise happy points at a single circuit, and that circuit is where the fault will be. Tell us which of the three you are looking at when you call, because it decides what the engineer brings.
It usually means the fault is inside your installation rather than on the incoming supply, because a network fault takes the lot. On many boards the circuits are split across two RCDs, so a single fault can drop one whole side and leave the other side working normally. That is one fault, not five. If you can get at the board safely, you can narrow it down yourself. Switch every breaker on the dead side off, put the RCD back up, then bring the circuits back one at a time until it drops again, and leave that one off for us. If the RCD will not hold with every breaker already off, stop there and say so when you call.
Not automatically. Plenty of board faults come down to one failed device, one loose connection or one circuit dragging the rest down, and replacing that is a repair rather than a rebuild. A replacement genuinely gets recommended where the board itself is the limiting factor — old rewireable fuses, no RCD protection at all, no room to add a way, or a damaged enclosure. That is a decision to make with the test results in front of you, not something anyone should be talked into while the lights are off.
10 Start here
Tell us your postcode and roughly what you are after. We come out, survey it properly, and put a written price in front of you — with the VAT position confirmed on it.
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