First, here’s a reminder of the electrical system when we bought the house. That photo at the right is a tremendously old school fuse box. It’s got effectively four circuits (fuses) that are 25A (amp) each for total service to the house of 100A. The 100A service is pretty typical, even these days, but 25A circuits are not. There are two key differences. First, today’s “typical” circuit is 15A or, more likely, 20A. Second, adding up the circuit breakers in a panel will total more than the 100A service while this has precisely the fuses to service the home. None of this is terribly important (to the typical homeowner) but I’m sure you can tell that the fuse box is quite outdated.
Here we are entering the 21st century with a new service panel. This panel handles 200A instead of the previous 100A. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll need more than 100A, but the difference in cost is about $100 on a job that’s a bit over $1,500, so it’s negligible. What did I get for the extra $100? The most valuable part of this upgrade is space – just having more room to work in the panel and more slots for extra circuits – that’s the best reason to go with 200A. And, if I needed to upgrade later, it would be very expensive and require tearing up the finished walls, so doing this now is definitely worthwhile.
The day of the upgrade wasn’t great weather, but it wasn’t expected to be too bad. Well, for the most part, it wasn’t. But precisely timed with the outdoor portion of the electrician’s effort was a long and steady downpour. He was a trooper, though – he tossed on a heavy raincoat, donned some thick gloves, and kept at it. He did inform me that there’s one step where he’d be tying into the municipal line that he’d need a break in the rain – luckily, that wasn’t an issue. Before I knew it, he was done outside and was tying in all the final components to the new panel inside.
Since I’ve got the walls open and I’ve seen the patchwork (and not to code) wiring in the house, I decided to rewire everything in the house. So the electrician simple left everything disconnected and wired two new outlets for me to use in the meantime. The only existing item we connected immediately was the water pump which actually had modern, outdoor grade (since it runs into the crawl space) romex wiring – so I felt good reusing that line. Everything else has since been stripped out of the house and I’ll be running all new lines soon. When I do, there will be a lot to blog about the new lines and circuits, how they meet code and what I’m doing to prepare for any future needs.
Below are a few reference photos that are useful to understand the upgrade:
