Guides & rules

No Power to Part of the House

We publish what the rules actually say about electrical work across the Austin metro — sourced, dated, and specific to your permit office and your utility. The work itself is carried out by electricians licensed by the state.

By the austinelectricalcontractor.net editorial team·Published 2026-08-12·Updated 2026-08-12

How much is dead tells you where the fault is. One outlet or one room usually points at a circuit or a tripped device upstream; roughly half the house points at the incoming supply, which is a different and more urgent problem.

First, work out how much is dead

The extent tells you where to look, and it is the one useful thing you can establish safely from outside the panel.

• One outlet. Usually that device, its connection, or a protective device upstream of it on the same circuit.
• Several outlets in one area. Usually one circuit — and often one shared protective device that has tripped somewhere less obvious, like a garage or bathroom.
• Half the house, roughly. This is the pattern that points at the incoming supply rather than at anything inside, and it is the one worth treating differently.
• Everything. Check whether the street is out before anything else.

Why “half the house” is its own category

A residential service arrives as two legs. Lose one and roughly half the circuits go dead while the other half carry on normally — which is why the symptom feels so strange, and why it is not a coincidence that people describe it as exactly half.

The cause may be on your side of the meter or on the utility's. That distinction matters practically: if it is the utility's, an electrician cannot fix it, and if it is yours, the utility will not. Either way it involves the service equipment rather than a single circuit, which puts it outside anything a homeowner should be opening.

It can also present with a warning: lights unusually bright on one part of the house and dim on another, or appliances behaving oddly rather than simply stopping. Treat that combination as urgent rather than curious, and switch off sensitive equipment.

Protective devices in unexpected places

The most common cause of a dead outlet with no tripped breaker is a protective device somewhere else on the same circuit. In practice they turn up in garages, bathrooms, outdoor boxes, behind appliances, and occasionally in a different room from everything they protect. Weather is a genuine trigger for the outdoor ones.

Establishing whether that is the answer is a legitimate thing to check before calling anyone. Beyond that, this page stops — diagnosis inside a device or a panel is not a reading exercise.

The older-house version

In houses wired between 1965 and the mid-1970s, part of the branch wiring may be aluminium, and the federal regulator's guidance is direct about what that changes: failing connections at those points seldom provide easily detected warning signs, and circuits that stop working are listed among the signs of an electrical system problem worth having a qualified electrician diagnose.

So an outlet that has “just stopped” in a house of that era is not a dead device to swap. It is a connection to open and inspect.

What to tell whoever comes out

Which rooms and which outlets, whether anything else was running at the time, whether the weather was involved, and whether it has happened before. That is usually enough to shorten the diagnosis substantially — and it costs you nothing.