"Ralph Mowery" wrote in message
m...

"Robert Green" wrote in message
...
Ralph, let me ask you what would you think if you found an older panel
(50
years old) with cloth covered wire that all looked to be about the same
age
and gauge. They're hooked up to a mix of half 20A and 15A breakers with
the
20A breakers being obviously much newer than any of the 15A breakers.
The
20A breakers were all made 10 years after the panel. The 15A breakers
have
the same manufacture date (almost) as the panel itself. (I'm excluded
some
of the newer circuits that were obvious late-comers like central A and
grounded outlets near windows for window A/C's for the sake of
simplicity.)


As stated above, the job is to replace the panel, not check out everything
in the house. I would look at the size of the wires and put in the
correct
breakers for the wires leaving the panel. Then report to the home owner
what I found. Really report first, then let the home owner make the
decision on how much he wanted to spend.

I was asking my question independent of the above case because it's the
situation I found when I began work on my own house's breaker panel. I've
always wondered if all the original circuits were 15A (which I suspect) or
that there was a legitimate mix of 15A and 20A breakers from the very
beginning.

Much the same when you take a car in for tires. If a mechanic finds other
issues such as bad breaks or out of alignment, he will change the tires,
and
report the other issues to the car owner.

There's a difference between electrical work and automobile repair work, I
think. If there's a safety issue discovered during an upgrade, IIRC it MUST
be corrected in order to receive approval from the electrical inspector.

As I noted in my original post, cutting the wires willy-nilly during an
upgrade could easily miss a situation where a lower value breaker was
deliberately placed on a circuit. It could be because the person that did
it was accommodating a circuit tap that he installed that put a greater than
original load on the circuit. In that case, the electrician sees a 15A
breaker on a 12 gauge wire and replaces it with a 20A breaker, not knowing
the circuit had 14 gauge wire somewhere downstream.

Derby Dad had it right in the first post. Cutting or disconnecting all the
panel wires without noting what breakers the wires were connected to is
wrong, wrong, wrong. Unless all the breakers are the same value, there's
too much potential to destroy clues relating to what might be special cases.

--
Bobby G.