Electrical faults don’t wait for a convenient moment. One minute you’re getting dinner on, the next you’re standing in the kitchen trying to work out whether that burning smell is something you call about right now, or something that can wait until Monday.
That uncertainty is the real problem. Wait too long and you’re risking your home and the people in it. Call out an electrician for every flickering globe and you’re spending money you didn’t need to spend.
So here’s the framework we use. It’s the same one we’d give a mate over the fence.
The three-tier rule
Every electrical issue falls into one of three buckets.
Critical — there’s active danger to life or property. Call 000 first, then call an electrician.
Urgent — a serious fault that could become a fire or a shock. Call an emergency electrician in Melbourne now, but you’re not evacuating.
Non-urgent — real work that needs doing, but it’ll keep until business hours.
Knowing which bucket you’re in is most of the battle.
Critical: call 000 first
Flames from an outlet, switchboard or appliance
Get everyone out. Call 000. Do not use water — water conducts electricity and you will make it worse. If you have an extinguisher rated for electrical fires and can use it safely, use it. Otherwise, leave it to the fire service.
Once the scene is clear, you’ll need a licensed electrician to find the cause before the system is re-energised. Whatever started one fire will happily start another.
Someone can’t let go
If a person is in contact with an electrical source and can’t release, their muscles have contracted around it. Do not touch them — you’ll become part of the circuit.
Kill the power at the main switch if you can reach it safely. If you can’t, use something non-conductive — a wooden broom handle — to separate them. Never anything metal. Call 000.
A fallen powerline
Assume it’s live. Stay at least ten metres back, call 000, and notify your distributor (United Energy or AusNet, depending on where you are). It doesn’t need to be sparking to kill you.
Smoke from the switchboard
If you can safely reach the main switch, turn it off. Then get out and call 000. This is seconds away from being a fire, not minutes.
Urgent: call an emergency electrician now
A burning or hot-plastic smell. This is the warning you get before the fire. Turn off the affected circuit and call. It does not resolve itself.
Sparks, blue flashes or crackling from a power point or switch. Loose connections or a short. Stop using it, kill that circuit, call.
Warm power points or switch plates. Outlets should never be warm to touch. Warmth means the insulation behind it is cooking.
A breaker that keeps tripping. The breaker is doing its job — it’s telling you something is wrong. Resetting it repeatedly is like taking the battery out of a smoke alarm because the noise annoys you.
Whole-property power loss when the neighbours still have power and there’s no planned outage. That’s your main switchboard or service connection.
Buzzing or humming from the switchboard. It should be silent. Noise means loose connections or failing components.
Exposed or damaged wiring. In Melbourne this is more common than people expect — possums in roof spaces and rats in wall cavities go through cable without a second thought.
What can wait
If there’s no smell, no sparks, no heat and no smoke, it’s almost certainly not an emergency. A single dead light fitting, new power points, an LED upgrade, a ceiling fan, a planned switchboard upgrade — all of it books in normally.
That said: if you’re not sure, ring us. We would far rather take a two-minute call that turns out to be nothing than have you sit on something that isn’t. There’s no charge for asking.
While you wait for us
Turn off the affected circuit if you can do it safely, and tape or label the breaker so nobody flips it back. Unplug the appliance rather than just switching it off. Keep people and pets clear of the area. Never put water near an electrical fault.
And don’t attempt the repair yourself. In Victoria, only licensed electricians can legally do electrical work — Energy Safe Victoria enforces it, and DIY work can void your home insurance entirely. More to the point, electricity doesn’t offer second attempts.
If you can, jot down when it started, what you were doing, any smells or sounds, whether anything was installed recently, and which breakers have tripped. It saves us diagnostic time, which saves you money.
One more thing: clear whatever’s stacked in front of the switchboard. We’ll need to get to it the moment we walk in.
Why Melbourne homes are particularly prone
Old housing stock. Through Hawthorn, Kew, Camberwell and the surrounding suburbs there are beautiful homes 50 to 100 years old running on wiring that was never designed for air conditioning, a home office, an EV charger and a heat pump all at once. Old ceramic fuse boxes offer none of the protection of a modern board with RCDs.
The weather. Storms cause surges when power is restored. Heavy rain gets into things it shouldn’t. Wind takes down overhead lines in the leafier suburbs every single season. After a serious weather event it’s worth having the system looked at even if everything appears fine.
Modern load. Households use dramatically more electricity than they did twenty years ago, often through systems that haven’t changed since.
Pests. Possums and rats chew cable. It usually goes unnoticed until it causes a fault — or worse.
If any of that sounds like your place, a house rewire or switchboard upgrade may be the answer rather than another patch.
Who you’re calling
When you ring Luno for an emergency, you get Andrew or one of our team — a registered master electrician, not a call centre. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s an emergency or whether it’ll keep.
Over 200 five-star Google reviews. On time, every time. We clean up after ourselves, even at 11pm. And every job we do carries a lifetime workmanship warranty — if something goes wrong with our work, we come back and fix it. No time limit.
We’re based in Hawthorn and we work across the eastern suburbs — Hawthorn, Kew, Richmond, Camberwell, Balwyn and Glen Iris — with after-hours callouts available outside normal hours.
Don’t wait for small to become serious
Dimming lights when the kettle goes on. A breaker that trips now and then. A power point that feels slightly warm. These are early warnings, and they’re much cheaper to act on than the emergency they turn into.
If something’s worrying you right now — or you’ve noticed one of those signs and you’ve been putting it off — get in touch. We’ll tell you straight what you’re dealing with.
Further reading: Emergency Electrician / Fault Finding · Emergency Electrician Near Me · Urgent Electrician Melbourne · Emergency Electrical Repair Melbourne
