Avista is up. Your neighbors have lights. Your house has nothing, or only half of it does. This is service entrance, main breaker, or open neutral territory, and the last one is dangerous enough that you should not start flipping switches before we get there.
If the whole neighborhood is out, that's an Avista problem and the right call is to their outage line, not to us. We can't fix utility-side problems and we'll tell you that on the phone in 30 seconds. What we fix is everything from your meter inward, plus the service entrance components on the customer side of the demarcation point.
The most common version of this call goes like this. The homeowner calls Avista. Avista runs their tests and confirms power is leaving the transformer just fine. Avista tells the homeowner the problem is on their side and to call an electrician. That's where we come in.
Not every power problem is an emergency. Here's how we triage these calls on the phone before sending a truck.
Most power complaints are inconvenient. A loose neutral is dangerous, and it's the reason we treat any whole-house dimming or flickering call as urgent even if nothing seems on fire. When the neutral connection at the meter base or main lug loosens, voltage on the two legs of your service starts to wander. One side of the house gets too much voltage, the other side gets too little. Anything plugged in can be damaged, and the connection itself can heat up to the point of failure.
If you're seeing lights that flicker without a storm, ovens or stoves that suddenly run too hot or too cold, or refrigerators and computers that keep dying for no reason, get us out before something catches fire. This is one of the calls where we're rolling within the hour.
For a tripped main breaker on a healthy panel, we test the breaker, replace if necessary, verify the load side, restore power, and we're done in under an hour. For a service entrance problem, we coordinate with Avista on the disconnect, repair or replace whatever component has failed (mast, weatherhead, meter base, service lugs), and coordinate the reconnect. For an open neutral, we're either retorquing the connection or replacing the meter base hardware, depending on why it failed in the first place.
Every restoration call ends with a printed test log: voltage on each leg, ground fault test, GFCI verification, and a written description of what failed and what we did. We hand this to you before we leave.
When the lights go out and Avista says it's not them, the failure is at one of these five locations. Knowing which one tells us how big the job is and how fast we need to get there.
Wind, ice, or a tree pulls the wire off the house. Always an Avista problem to drop, our problem to rebuild the attachment so they can reconnect.
The pipe and fitting where the wire enters the building. Storm damage is the usual reason. We rebuild it overnight and certify for utility reconnect.
Where Avista's responsibility ends and yours begins. Loose lugs here cause whole-house flickering and are the dangerous version of this call.
Failed main breaker, burned bus bar, FPE or Zinsco letting go. The most common emergency fix and the one we have the most parts on the truck for.
One room dark, one circuit dead. Usually a tripped GFCI hidden somewhere unexpected, sometimes a backstabbed outlet that finally gave up.
A standard service call diagnostic with a same-night fix runs $165 to $450, all in. Service entrance work that needs Avista coordination and parts can climb higher, and we tell you the realistic number on the phone before we drive out. The phone diagnosis is always free, even if it ends with us telling you to call someone else.
See full pricing →The diagnosis is free over the phone. If we can save you a service call, we'll tell you. If we can't, we'll roll a truck.
509.555.0199