Orlando Electrician FAQ: Straight Answers From Our Lake Mary Team

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the calls that come into our Lake Mary office most often. If your situation is not covered below, phone us and ask. We would rather talk you out of a service call than sell you one you did not need.

My power is out but my neighbors still have theirs. Is that a utility problem or mine?

Almost always yours, and the dividing line is easy to find. Duke Energy covers most of Seminole and west Orange County, OUC serves inside Orlando city limits, and a few cities such as Winter Park run their own municipal utility. Their responsibility ends at the weatherhead or the meter. Everything past that point belongs to the house: the mast, the meter enclosure, the service conductors and the panel. A whole-house outage with the street still lit usually means a failed main breaker, a burned lug or a lost neutral.

A storm damaged the mast and meter box on the side of my house. Who repairs that?

We do. The service mast, weatherhead, meter enclosure and entrance conductors are all homeowner-owned equipment, so the utility will not rebuild them for you. The order of operations is what catches people out: the utility cuts power at the drop, we replace the damaged mast and meter can, the local building department inspects the work, and only then is the meter reset and power restored. We coordinate that sequence so you are not left relaying messages between three organizations.

Half the outlets in my garage are dead but no breaker tripped. What now?

Go looking for a GFCI before you touch the panel. One GFCI receptacle routinely protects a whole string of outlets downstream of it, so a single tripped device can kill receptacles in the garage, a bathroom, the patio and the lanai all at once, none of them anywhere near it. Press reset on every GFCI you can find, including any GFCI breaker sitting in the panel. If it refuses to hold, something on that circuit is genuinely faulting and needs tracing rather than repeated resetting.

We had a close lightning strike and now only some things work. What should we check?

Central Florida takes more lightning than anywhere else in the country, and a near strike rarely kills everything evenly. Pay attention to the pattern. If roughly half the house is dim and the other half is running unusually bright, that points to a lost neutral rather than surge damage, and it is the urgent one because it puts every appliance at risk. Also check whether your surge protective device still shows a green status light, because they wear out silently after taking a hit.

My outlets feel warm and the house has aluminum wiring. How worried should I be?

Warm enough to notice deserves attention now. On aluminum branch circuits the failure point is almost always the terminations, where oxidation and a loosening screw build heat behind the wall plate, and older Maitland, Mount Dora and Winter Park homes have plenty of it. The accepted repair is to pigtail copper at each device with connectors listed for aluminum to copper splices, then fit devices rated for aluminum and torque them to spec. A full rewire is rarely the answer. Stop using the circuit until someone has looked.

My older home has two-prong outlets. Can they be replaced with grounded ones?

Not by simply swapping in a three-prong receptacle, which is the usual shortcut and leaves you with an outlet that looks safe and is not. Where no equipment ground exists, the two compliant routes are to pull a proper ground to the outlet, or to protect the circuit with a GFCI and label those receptacles as having no equipment ground. The GFCI route is legitimate and far less invasive, but understand that it protects people rather than sensitive electronics.

How do I tell whether my panel is one of the problem brands?

Open the panel door and read the label inside. The names that matter here are Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco, whose breakers have a documented record of failing to trip on a fault, plus Pushmatic and Sylvania, which are obsolete enough that parts are scarce. Challenger is the one that fools people: the older panels are a genuine concern, while the Eaton-branded versions are still accepted, so the name alone does not settle it. Send us a photo of the label and we will tell you which you have.

Can I add an EV charger without upgrading my whole panel?

Often, yes. What decides it is a load calculation, not the number of empty breaker slots, and plenty of the 150 and 200 amp panels around here have headroom once the real demand is worked out. Where they do not, the fix is usually smaller than a service upgrade: a charger set to a lower amperage, a load management device that pauses charging while the dryer or range runs, or a subpanel. We wire Tesla, J1772 and NACS units and size the circuit to the car.

Do you actually cover Seminole County, or only the city of Orlando?

Seminole is our single largest service area by job volume, not an afterthought. We dispatch from Lake Mary, and Longwood, Sanford, Oviedo, Winter Springs, Altamonte Springs and Casselberry together account for more of our work than the city of Orlando does. North and west Orange County are covered too, including Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden, Maitland and Windermere, and we run south into Osceola County for St. Cloud. The full list lives on our areas we serve page.