Electrical Panel Question

James "Cubby" Culbertson · 2005-01-04T06:49:21+00:00

Hiya,I've got a 10 year old house with a single electrical panel with a main breaker of 100A. Theliterature attached to the panel says it's rated for 125A. I'm not sure what the feed from the electricalcompany is....doesn't say on the meter unfortunately. Oh yeah, the panel is full. Here's my dilemma:I want to add some 220v to the garage to power a table saw and dust collector. I'm not sure how toapproach this (an electrician will do the work but I want to be able to have an idea how to go about this).I have a 30A/220v/2 pole breaker that serves the dryer that isn't used. So I could remove the existing wiresand run my receptacles from that but I'm not sure I like this idea. Particularly if we want to sell the housedown the road. A second option, and I'm not sure this can be done code wise, is removing the guts of thecan and replace with a higher service rated setup (ie. bus bars, lugs, etc...). It looks like there is room fora larger set up and the can even has pre-drilled holes to accept a larger setup (of course I need to verifythe feed from the electric company is set up for a higher amperage). Is this Code legal given thesticker says "Max. of 125A" on it? Another option is to replace the entire service which I really would ratheravoid. I tried the "replace the breakers with slim breakers" approach to free up the space but unfortunately,everything was already "slim". Any other ideas on how to approach this? What sort of permits etc might Ineed (different places, different rules, just looking for a general idea).I am considering adding an outbuilding sometime down the road and was thinking it might make sense toscrap the current setup and put in a larger panel/can/etc.... and run the outbuilding on a sub panel. Unfortunately,I don't have the cashola to build that building right now and not sure I ever will. So for now, I'm prettymuch looking for what will work vs. what makes more sense for down the road.Anyway, thanks very much for any...

Jan 04, 2005 21 Replies

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James "Cubby" Culbertson 21 years ago

Unfortunately, that's about $1700 more than I can afford! I'll add my $75 subpanel and if/when the time comes to put up a shop, I'll bite the bullet then. Cheers, cc

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James "Cubby" Culbertson 21 years ago

Hiya Folks, Just wanted to say thank you to everyone for their comments. After giving it some thought I just went ahead and did the job myself. So I now have a small subpanel feeding my new tablesaw and my cyclone (when I finish building it!). There were no sparks (kidding!) and it seems to work fine.

Interesting thing though. I called my municipality about permits/inspections etc.... and they still haven't called me back. I'm pretty confident my install is up to code so when they do finally get with me, I hope it's a quick sign-off.

Thanks again folks for all the help!

Cheers, cc

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