Electrical Services: Steps To Take When You Have Flickering Lights | Myrtle Beach, SC

7/6/2020

Photo By mustafagull at istock

Flickering lights can make the experience of being in any of the rooms in your house incredibly annoying. Whether you’re trying to catch an episode of your favorite show in your living room or trying to pack in some reading into the evening, everything goes much smoother when your lighting is stable.

Beyond just the annoyance of failing to see things properly, flickering lights can cause headaches to people who are particularly vulnerable to them, making the hazard one to watch out for. For your home, they can point to a problem that can easily unravel. It can mean that the light fixtures or circuitry in your home are not in the best shape, in turn meaning that you need to call electrical services to handle the problem before it gets worse.

If flickering lights have started to be a problem in your home, read on to find out how best you can deal with them, along with some preliminary checks to do before picking up the phone and having a professional repairman stamp out the issue.

Finding the Reason

Though you are not always able to spot it, all the lights in your house flicker to varying extents. It all depends on how much power is coming through the lines and into your home. Regular flickering is a sure sign that there’s a problem, though that doesn’t automatically point to the kind of problem you might be experiencing. The problem may lie with either the entire connection itself or it may be limited to just your usage.

Some of the signs can easily lead you to discover the cause of the flickering of your lights. If your lights are only flickering when you’ve turned on your air conditioner, for example, that’s a clear sign that the problem is more to do with power supply than with the connection. In this case, your lights are flickering because the air conditioner is, in effect, diverting some of the power that would otherwise go to the lights.

This kind of flickering tends to be temporary. Again, it may be a sign that your outside air conditioning unit hasn’t been properly wired to receive the maximum amperage it can. Such situations only apply when you have a large appliance that, when you power it up, causes your lights to flicker. This may also be associated with other dips in the regulation of your electricity in your home. It’s not absolutely important to find this out, as electrical services are able to find out the exact problem. Still, it makes it easier for a service to get to the problem quicker.

Without a large appliance drawing your power before the lights in your Myrtle Beach, SC, home start flickering, the problem may be with either the meter or the electrical panel. If you’re having one light in the room intermittently dimming while the others are not, that tends to mean that the light itself may be the problem. Or alternatively, it may mean that there’s an issue with the socket that holds the bulb.

If on the other hand, you have flickering lights that are affecting an entire room of the house but only confined to it, that’s a clue that the circuitry itself has some issues. In a room with only one light, changing the bulb can clear up any confusion as to whether or not the problem is just with the socket. Either way, the best thing to do in this case is to call electrical services so they can investigate the exact nature of the problem. They’ll be able to get your lights working well again.

Troubleshooting Flickering Lights

Troubleshooting flickering lights and getting to the exact source of the problem can be a little difficult. Complicating it further, the process differs depending on the type of lights you have. While light-emitting diodes or LED bulbs are rapidly replacing fluorescent light bulbs in many both tend to flicker when they are triggered. However, the differences in the lights also mean that they flicker because of different reasons, and the pattern or nature of the flickering also differs for each light depending on the particular cause. Electrical services can look further into the flickering to determine its cause and how best to effectively solve it.

For a fluorescent light bulb, flickering often points to the starter in an outdated fixture starting to malfunction. Sometimes it just means that the light bulb is beginning to die out. There are multiple ways to see the problem with a flickering fluorescent light bulb. The easiest is to check the pins in the tube, since these can quite easily tell you if the electrode inside the tube is in good shape. You can put the pins in a tube that you’re certain is in good working order. You may also rotate a bulb gently into its clips until you can feel the engagement of the electrodes. Seeing a dark spot tells you that the bulb is no good and you need to replace it.

LED lights tend to flicker as a result of voltage changes that occur within the power supply. This, for many Myrtle Beach, SC, homes, is a fairly common occurrence that doesn’t cause too much of a problem when electrical services are called in time.

Calling Electrical Services

Without the right tools and expertise, it’s not only incredibly difficult but also hazardous to try to repair a flickering light. The safest and best route to take, instead, is to call electrical services who have the means and knowledge to get to the exact root of the problem and solve it.

Even when you have a handle of the source of the problem, the best course of action is to call electrical services so they can investigate further and provide a solution that is both safe and effective.

Though flickering lights can be a huge annoyance, they are not a tough problem to solve. Looking into the problem yourself is a good start, so you can hand the information over to electrical services who can fix the problem for you. Call us at Mister Sparky of Myrtle Beach to get your lights back in working order.