Power outage in Montreal: Hydro-Québec or an electrician?

The lights go out on a December evening. The baseboards stop ticking, the fridge goes quiet, and the house starts cooling. You reach for your phone, and the first question matters more than most people realize: is this Hydro-Québec’s problem, or yours?

Get it right and the repair may cost you nothing. Get it wrong and you pay an electrician to stand in your kitchen while the network gets fixed anyway. Here is how to tell the difference in the first five minutes, before you spend a dollar.

Look outside first

The most useful diagnostic tool tonight is your window.

If the whole street is dark, the streetlights are off and your neighbours are finding their candles, the failure is on the distribution network. That equipment belongs to Hydro-Québec, and Hydro-Québec repairs it at no cost to you. No electrician can restore a fallen line on their network, and none should charge you to try.

If your home is the only one dark, or only part of it is dark, the problem is closer to you. It may sit in your panel, your wiring, or the service entrance on the side of your house. That territory belongs to a licensed master electrician.

That one observation, the whole street or just my house, settles most cases before you have called anyone.

When it is Hydro-Québec, and free

Check with Hydro-Québec before calling anyone else. Their live outage map tells you in seconds whether your address sits inside a known outage. If it does, crews are already assigned, and your only job is to wait well.

Two other situations belong to Hydro-Québec:

• Scheduled shutdowns. The utility sometimes cuts power for planned work on the network. A call to Hydro-Québec confirms it, and the power returns when the work is done.
• Area outages that have not reached the map yet. December is the season for these. Wet snow loads the lines, freezing rain coats them, wind drops branches across them. If a storm just passed through your area, think network first.

Report the outage to Hydro-Québec even if you suspect a neighbour already has. It helps them size the problem, and it puts your address on the record.

When you need an electrician

Some signs point inside your own installation:

• Your neighbours have power and you do not.
• Half the house works. Some circuits are dead, and lights dim or brighten on their own. This can mean one of the two lines feeding your panel has stopped supplying.
• The main breaker trips and will not hold.
• Ice or wind has pulled on the service wire and bent the mast on the side of the house.

As a general rule, Hydro-Québec maintains the network up to the point where it connects to your home. The equipment attached to the building, the service mast, the meter base, the panel and everything past it, is the owner’s responsibility, and a licensed electrician is the person who repairs it.

Now the nuance that is worth money. Even when only your home is out, the cause can still sit on Hydro-Québec’s side of the connection. A master electrician can determine the cause on site and tell you whether Hydro-Québec covers it. When it does, Hydro-Québec handles the billing. This has been our advice for years: nobody should pay for a failure that was never theirs.

One exception overrides everything above. If you smell burning, hear sizzling, or see scorch marks at the panel, do not wait for anyone’s map. Cut the main breaker if you can reach it safely, and call an electrician now.

While you wait, in winter

A Montreal outage in December is mostly a patience problem, if you handle a few things early:

• Keep the fridge and freezer closed. They hold their temperature far longer that way.
• Unplug sensitive electronics, and leave one light switched on so you notice the moment power returns.
• Turn your thermostats down before the power comes back, then raise them gradually. Every baseboard in the house restarting at once is a heavy load on your own installation too.
• Never run a generator, camp stove or barbecue indoors, in the garage, or near a window. Carbon monoxide is a harder problem than the dark.

And if the street is lit while your house sits dark, that is exactly what our emergency line is for. Lighthouse Electrique has answered Montreal’s electrical problems since 2007, day and night, in English and in French. Call (514) 909-3773 and describe what you see. If it sounds like Hydro-Québec’s problem, we will say so and point you back to their map, because you should not pay for work you do not need. If it is your installation, our 24 hour emergency electrician service takes it from there.