In alt.home.repair, on Sun, 21 Jan 2018 06:22:32 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 3:35:37 PM UTC-5, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 1/20/2018 2:45 PM, micky wrote:
A neighbor asked me about upgrading her breaker box.

I used to know what it is. However now, to see the value on my main
breaker would require climbing on the dryer and using a mirror but I do
know that the box has 4 duplex breakers (for the oven, water heater, AC,
and clothes dryer), 12 15-amp breakers and it has 6 empty slots before I
used one. One breaker is a GFI.

Does that imply how much amperage the house is wired for?

They were built in 1979-80. 3 floors including basement, 3 bedrooms.

It seems to me there is nothing a normal person could want to add that
would require a bigger box. Maybe an electric chair would need more.

??



What do you mean by "bigger box?

The main breaker will tell you how many amps you can handle.
The number of slots will tell you how "big" the box is.

You can have 100A service, common about 1980, but not have enough slots
to handle the individual circuits you want to have. Given the amount of
electric appliances she has, it may well be 150 or 200A service.

Since she has empty slots, I'm going to assume you mean she wants to
increase the amperage. Why? Does she trip the main breaker cooking in
the oven with the AC on and the water heater working? If so, yes, she
needs an increase. If no, never tripped it, no good reason I can think
of except for that electric chair. Since most electrocutions are held
at midnight, just don't use the oven or dryer during the ceremony.

I asked that at the beginning, why the interest in the upgrade.
And I agree, it doesn't sound like a panel upgrade alone is
needed, because he says there are empty slots. So it's probably a
service upgrade that he's talking about, unless the service is already
100A or larger and they put a 60A panel in. And if doing a service upgrade,
if the service has to
be upgraded then it might as well be to 200A. One thing everyone agrees on
60A service circa 1980 for a 3 floor, 3 bedroom house sure doesn't sound right,
if it was permitted, done by a pro, etc. I asked if this could be a
subpanel, particularly because he says the main breaker is on the side,
in the middle of the panel. IDK, maybe they make main panels like that,
but I never saw one.

Sure you've seen one. It's just a panel with no vertically-oriented.
double wide slot at the top. It just has two rows of horizontal slots
and they used slots 5 and 6 down from the top, on the right, for the
main breaker. Above that on the left and right are the 4 pairs of
breakers for 220v appliances and below that are the 12 single breakers
for 110 stuff.

It's one of 100 townhouses built on one piece of land over a year or two
starting in 1979.

For a while, I was even in the same social organization as the son of
the banker who financed the project, whose father got him a summer job
working as a laborer on some of the houses. And the electrician lived
in one of the houses for maybe 10 years. You could tell his house
because it has real lights along the sidewalk, and it has a vent to the
outside above the front sliding glass door to vent the range. Everyone
else just has a range hood that merely recirculates the air. After he
moved out of here, I'd see his electrical truck parked outside a
"detached" house about a mile away. And the guy who did the
landscaping and plowed the snow used to live here too.