Lights Working But Not Power Points

Lights working but not power points? To many average Australians having no electricity at your power points seems like a strange issue that doesn’t make any logical sense. How could some of the power in your home work, but not all?

It is actually very simple, and it’s even a safety feature. The thing that is causing this problem is literally called a “Safety Switch”. This clever little switch is designed to shut off all power to all the electrical power points in a house if any kind of electrical “surge” is detected.

As a real estate agency we frequently get calls about this from tenants whose power points all have no power, but the lights are still working. They are confused and would like us to send an electrician to fix this. The issue here is that it is almost certainly a faulty appliance, and unfortunately electricians don’t work for free, and will want to be paid for their time to attend the property.

So tenants, unless you would like to be paying the electrician’s call out fee to tell you that your toaster or kettle is broken, we recommend you do the following steps:

1. Turn off every power point in the house (literally every single one)
2. Go to your electricity metre box
3. Flick the safety switch back on
4. Assuming it now stays on, systematically go through every power point in the house, turning them back on, until you discover which appliance is causing the surge (it can even be small appliances like alarm clocks)
5. Remove and replace faulty appliance

To older Australians you might be wondering how people don’t know what a safety switch is. Whilst most older Australian’s seem to have no issue with this, as they were probably an adult living in a house when safety switches were first introduced as mandatory, many younger Australians have lived at home or were children during this period, and for some reason the knowledge of what a safety switch is and how it works hasn’t been passed down from parent to child in many cases. Possibly it is considered such common knowledge by some that it wasn’t deemed worth instructing teenagers in?

If you are currently experiencing this issue, some helpful tips:

• You can open your electricity metre box at the property you live in, you don’t need to be an electrician to do this.
• Flicking the safety switch back on is very simple and safe to do.
• This great little switch is designed to keep you safe and stop anyone from being electrocuted in the case of a faulty appliance, it isn’t designed to hurt you.

If after following steps 1-3 above and all power-points are definitely off, your safety switch keeps flicking itself back off automatically, then there is an underlying issue and an electrician will need to attend. This time the landlord will likely need to foot the bill.