All of my lights flicker. Call the electric company, or an electrician?

Now that I've solved my hot/neutral reverse problem, I'd like to get a handle on another electrical problem I'm having with my new house. (This was happening before I fixed the hot/neutral reverse problem... so I know it isn't anything I did )

Every now and then, my lights will flicker. Some people who have been over said they didn't notice it, others did. The flickering is very rapid -- almost strobe-like, but the lights don't actually power down.

Initially, I thought it was just a bad bulb or two, but I've replaced them with known-good bulbs, and the problem still exists.

My guess is that there's a problem with line, and that I should call the electric company to come take a look at it. The rationale being that this is happening on different circuits, so it probably isn't an inside wiring problem. But I wanted to run this by you guys and see if there's something else I should look at.

 

You can call your power company first. That's always a good place to start because it's free. They may be able to tighten a loose connection, or maybe they'll decide that the service wires or transformer is overloaded.

However, flickering so slight and so brief that not everybody even notices may not be worth fixing. You may just have sensitive eyes. All lights flicker when a new load comes on (simple unavoidable physics), but the flicker is usually so slight that nobody notices.