A socket has stopped working: what to check, and when to call

It's one of the most ordinary faults there is, and its causes range from a plug that isn't pushed in properly to a loose wire heating up behind the faceplate. The checks below need no tools, and they're in the order we'd do them ourselves. If the whole home has lost power, see our page on a breaker that keeps tripping instead.

First, test with something else

Plug in an appliance you know works, a lamp or a phone charger, straight into the socket, without an extension lead or an adaptor. If it works, the problem is the appliance or the adaptor, not your installation.

Think about switched sockets too. In a living room or bedroom, one of the sockets is sometimes wired to a wall switch, so you can turn a lamp on from the door. If that switch is off, the socket gives nothing. It sounds silly, but it's a classic.

Look at the electrical panel

Open the panel and look for a breaker in the down position. If you find one, push it back up once. If it trips again straight away, leave it down: it's protecting a circuit with a fault, and there's no point insisting.

But quite often nothing has moved at the panel. A socket can be dead without any breaker reacting, because a loose connection causes neither an overload nor a leak. The current simply stops getting there.

When several sockets in the room are dead

The sockets in a room are often wired one after the other: the current reaches the first, carries on to the second, then to the third. French electricians call this "repiquage", or daisy-chaining. If one connection fails in any of them, every socket further down the chain goes dead, and the panel doesn't notice a thing.

It looks like a big fault, and it's often just a wire that has slipped out of its terminal. You still have to find the right socket, which isn't necessarily in the same room. We open them one by one, with the power off, until we find where the chain breaks.

Signs that mean stop

A socket that's hot, blackened or smells of burning isn't something to test: switch off its breaker and don't plug anything into it again. Those marks usually come from a bad connection. A contact that doesn't grip properly heats up as soon as current flows through it, and the heat damages the socket a little more each time. It's a real fire risk.

The same goes if the socket crackles, if the plug keeps working its way out, or if the appliance cuts out when you touch the lead. Those are loose contacts, and they never get better with time.

Fix it yourself, or call us

Replacing a socket is within reach of a careful DIYer, provided you switch off the right breaker and check there's no voltage with a tester before touching the wires. But if the new socket works no better than the old one, the fault is somewhere else: in another socket on the chain, in a junction box hidden behind a piece of furniture, or on a wire damaged inside the wall. Then it needs tracking down, and that's our job.

On site, we measure the voltage at the socket, then work back along the circuit to where the current stops. A loose terminal gets tightened, a damaged socket gets replaced. A wire cut by a screw or a nail is repaired in a junction box that stays accessible, as the standard requires, rather than with a connector block buried in the plaster.

Travel and the first half-hour are included in our €132 incl. VAT call-out, which is usually enough for a socket. If the repair needs more, we tell you the price before carrying on, and if we can't find the fault, you aren't charged for the call-out.

If you'd like an extra socket while we're there, everything is on our page about adding a socket. For other faults, see our electrical repair page, or contact us directly.