Electrical Panel eh? Why not!

I designated Friday as the day that I would replace the electrical panel.  I took the day off of work, scheduled with Xcel, and even called the city to schedule an inspection for same day.  It was go time!

Kim from Xcel Energy came over promptly at 8am to shut of the power from the main in the neighbor's backyard.  This was necessary to do because not only was I replacing the electrical panel, but also the meter socket.  The meter socket is the place where their energy meter goes ... it's how they tell how much power you're using.  I had to upgrade ours because I was also upgrading our panel from 150 amps to 200 amps.

Some say: "Why upgrading to 200 amps? There's no way you'll need that much power."  These people obviously have no idea what kind of juice it takes to power a batcave!  Well actually, those people are right but that's not why I need 200 amps.  It's actually only because I couldn't find a panel locally that had enough spaces for all the breakers with 150 amps.  I was able to find a 200 amp 30-space 40-circuit panel for the same price as a 30-space 30-circuit panel -- so it was a good deal!

The old panel was a Federal Pacific Electric (FPE) panel.  If you Google FPE, you'll see why we wanted to replace it.  It was actually a huge item during our home inspection when we were buying the place, but the previous owners got one over on us by saying they'd replace the dishwasher instead.  We found out later that they had already purchased a new dishwasher, so that worked great for them!  Not so great for us.

Back to the panel -- the old panel had these Stab-Lok breakers that pushed into the bar at the back.  Since I was adding three new circuits for our master bath remodel, that meant I would have to buy three new breakers for this panel.  Do you see three empty spots?  NOPE.  Plus, each breaker for this old type of panel is $43 each!  A breaker for a new panel is only $3.15 each, and it will actually work when it's supposed to!  New panel it is!

When it came to the materials that I had to buy for the replacement, nothing was straight-forward. I actually ended up doing a lot of shopping, a lot of research, a lot of returns, a lot of shopping, a lot of research, and more returns, then a final purchase before ending up with all the right stuff.  I decided on a Square D 200A Outdoor 40-circuit 30-space panel.  It has only 30 spaces but allows for 40 circuits because 10 of those spaces are for tandem circuits.  Tandem, in this case, means that one space holds two breakers (it's like a 2-in-1 breaker).  This part was crucial for me since I'll be adding basement circuits later on and need the space.

I spent all day Friday replacing the panel.  I started at 8am and finished around 9pm.  Most of the day consisted of getting everything in place and running the 56' of copper ground across the house to the cold water hookup ... and then a few hours of splicing wires!  I had to splice all the neutral and ground wires since they all were really short (because of the old hookup near the bottom) and they wouldn't fit on the new panel's neutral and ground buses.

Old box with short wires attached to ground/neutral bus.

Pulling supply lines into the new panel.

Finished splicing all of those lines and tucking them in.  Looks good for what I had to do!

The splicing of all of those wires - about 40 - took forever and I did most of it in the dark.  By the end of the night, I got it all done and the power back on without any fires!  Yay!

Saturday and Sunday were spent cleaning things up and running the new lines from the bathroom as well as figuring out what each breaker controlled.  Running the new lines was definitely the biggest pain in the butt, especially since I accidentally drilled into some live wires!  Luckily I hit them right above a junction box and was able to pull them in and splice it back together.

The inspector came out on Monday and said everything looked pretty good.  He did say that I missed a few grounds though, one to the meter housing and another to the cable and phone hookups.  I got all of that done and ready for the re-inspection on Friday, which I passed easily after making the needed corrections.

Total cost for upgrading to a 200 amp electrical panel and meter housing with bypass lever:

Electrician: at LEAST $1500-$2000

Johnny: $601.66

About $150 of that cost was for the bare copper for the FIVE grounds and extra cable for splicing.  Not bad at all!