Are the lights in your home flickering? Unless you are currently starring in a horror movie, that probably isn’t supposed to happen. You are probably wondering why your ordinary home lightbulb suddenly turned into a strobe light. Electricity is a tricky and complicated thing. Lucky for you, we are here to tell you everything you need to know about flickering lights.

Isolate Flickers

The first step in fixing a flickering light, is finding out why the light is flickering in the first place. Is your light flicker just happening in one room, or is just one specific lightbulb flickering? If so, the problem could be simple. It may be that you simply have a bad bulb, or the connection to the socket is bad. If all the lights in a single room are flickering, it could be a circuit issue, which means it is time to call an electrician.

Periodic Flickers

What if many light in your home start flickering, but it only happens occasionally, and only for a brief period of time. This may be occurring because an appliance such as an air conditioner is draw too much power from your home system. Most homes draw 200 amps of electricity. Large air conditioning units can draw 100+ amps. Next time your lights flicker, listen closely and try to see if your air conditioning unit just kicked on at the same time. If so, the best fix is easy. Call an electrician.

Everyone’s Lights are Flickering!

This is not a common problem, but it does happen from time to time. Not just your lights are flickering, but it is happening to everyone in the neighborhood. This is a sign of a larger electrical problem, and is usually associated with your power company. It can happen if power lines get damaged by something like a lightning strike. In this event, all you can do is wait the situation out, and hope your power company fixes it soon.