Eight wiring signs in a finished Nigerian home that mean call a professional

Most houses in this country carry wiring installed by the seat of someone's pants - competent in their habit, not in your standards. The reassuring part of electrical faults is that almost every serious one announces itself visibly and early. This page is a translation guide for those announcements, plus the boundary: what you may tighten, what you must hire.

Call-a-professional signs, ranked by how fast they matter

• A socket or plug that is warm, smells of hot plastic, or has brown ghost-marks around the pins. That's resistance heating at a loose connection - a fire that has begun its paperwork. Stop using the socket today, and "today" is the entire warning.
• Lights dim or bulbs surge when a large appliance starts. Classic loose neutral or overloaded joint - the supply is being shared through a connection smaller than it should be. This one is not cosmetic and not "old houses do that."
• No earth wire at three-pin sockets. A strip of green-yellow is not decoration; without it an appliance fault makes the metal case - the fridge, the water heater - the live conductor through whoever touches it. Any socket cover you open to find bare copper ends and no earth is a rewiring conversation, not a repair.
• Twisted tape joins inside walls or above ceilings. Where a junction box should be, a "handled with tape and confidence" splice waits. Tape dries; joints oxidise; faults don't. Every hidden join should sit in an accessible box with a proper connector.
• One breaker that won't stay in, or trips when the kettle and anything else run. Either the circuit is overloaded past its cable's rating - breakers protect cables, so a breaker that's fighting its job means the cable is losing it - or the breaker itself is tired. Neither is a swap-shop job; both need an actual load check.
• A board where circuits are shared by improvisation: kitchen on the lights' breaker, AC on a "twin" slot crammed into a space for one device, the spare ways stacked double. Every legitimate panel spare that got two breakers where one sat is how this list begins.
• Burnt, blackened or "melted-sweet" plastic at the meter tails or changeover. Supply side: hands off, notify the service provider and get a licensed contractor with their paperwork for anything ahead of your main switch.
• An RCD that has never been tested or never trips on test. The little test button exists for one ritual: press it every quarter. No trip from a live safety device is no safety device.

What you may actually fix yourself

With the breaker off and a confirmed dead with your own tester: re-clip a faceplate, replace a switch on the same terminals, swap a flex on a lamp. Anything that runs inside a wall, spans a joint, touches the board, or involves the meter - professional. This desk states its boundary without apology: water, aluminium mains and "small corrections at night" are the three words nearest every tragedy in the news.

The sentence to say when you hire

"Test first, quote second, certificate with the work." A real electrician can explain load and circuit for every breaker in your board, will never laugh at the warm-socket question, and expects you to ask for what the wiring in your house is actually made of. If the conversation starts with "how much for me to just add a socket here," the correct answer is a different electrician.