Electrician in Alicante

Alicante is really three cities electrically. The old town has narrow party-wall buildings where supply cables were retrofitted into structures that never planned for them. The ensanche and Benalúa are dominated by blocks built between the 1950s and 1970s, which is where we do most of our board work. The PAU districts and newer developments to the north are modern installations where the faults are different in kind.

Knowing which of the three you are in tells us most of what to expect before we arrive, and it is why the same fault description gets a different set of questions depending on your address.

What we are usually called to in Alicante

The single commonest job in the ensanche blocks is a consumer unit that has run out of capacity. These flats were wired for a fraction of today's load, and forty years of adding an air conditioning unit here and a new kitchen circuit there eventually produces a board where everything hangs off one or two residual current devices. One failing appliance then takes out the whole flat rather than one circuit.

In the old town, the recurring problem is cable routes. Supply and communications cables have often been added to the outside of buildings or squeezed through shared risers over decades, and tracing which circuit belongs to which flat can take longer than the repair. We charge for the work, not for the archaeology.

In the newer northern districts, installations are generally sound and the calls are about additions — a car charger, a second air conditioning system, a solar array — where the question is what the existing board and supply can absorb.

Communal meter rooms and who is responsible for what

In most Alicante blocks the meters are centralised in a room at ground level, and the boundary between the community's responsibility and yours sits at your meter. Everything from there to your flat, including the rising cable, is generally yours; the room, the enclosure and the communal supply are the community's.

This matters because it decides who pays. We are frequently called to a fault that turns out to be on the communal side, and when that happens we say so and put it in writing for the administrator rather than quietly fixing it and invoicing the wrong person.

For car chargers this same room is usually where the work starts, because a dedicated supply for a charging point is cleanest taken from the meter position rather than from inside the flat.

Earthing in older Alicante flats

A significant number of flats built before the 1970s have no functional earth, and the sockets were later replaced with earthed ones that connect to nothing. This is invisible until something goes wrong, and it is the fault we most often find while investigating something else entirely.

It matters most in bathrooms and kitchens, and it matters more once an air conditioning unit or a washing machine is on the circuit. If we find it, we tell you plainly what it means and what the options are, which usually range from earthing individual circuits to a full rewire depending on the state of the conduit.