Electrical Panel Replacement
2007.06.04
The electrician showed up around 8:30 this morning. He was an interesting character… about 50, divorced, lives on a sailboat, and drives a Cadillac. Ha!
The first thing he did was disconnect the meter, and hook up temporary power to an extension cord so he could hang a couple work lights down in the basement to see what he was doing. He was intrigued by my time-of-use meter with its digital LED readout, and had never even heard of the time-of-use option with PGE (?!)
Next we had to demolish the enclosure around the old electrical panel, which had been framed up with 2x4’s and then drywalled. I have no idea why they decided to sandwich four studs on one side.
The electrician seemed a little put out that he had to do some demo work to get started, and so I jumped in and did most of it. He complained that the estimator had underbid the amount of work involved in this project, and wasn’t sure if he was going to get it all done today. Oh great, I thought, like I haven’t used enough of my vacation time already.
The next step was disconnecting and labeling all the wires in the existing panel. Unfortunately, some of them had never been labeled in the first place, and (as it turned out later), some were mislabeled. After all the wires were out, he removed the panel itself (including breakers).
The old panel was grounded to the water line, which is pretty typical for old houses (gas line is another option). These days the standard practice is to ground the panel via two 8-foot by 5/8-inch aluminum grounding rods driven into the soil near the house.
According to the electrician, most guys just push these things into the ground by hand (there are a couple or three methods), but he had an impressive pneumatic demolition hammer. The two rods are spaced a few feet apart (I think six feet is the minimum) and then connected in series with a large grounding wire. This goes back into the house and connects to the grounding bus in the panel.
The old panel was pretty small, and the hot bus set was near the top. New panels are a lot longer, and the busses are towards the middle. Unfortunately this meant that the existing wires that needed to connect into the new panel were too short, including the mains. So this process took a lot longer than it could have, because he had to splice almost every single hot wire, neutral wire, and ground wire in the panel.
The mains were spliced with a special connector that basically looked like a large bolt and nut, with two holes through the bolt where the incoming main and the extension piece fit through. Because these are aluminum mains (sometimes they are copper), he had to coat the bare wires with an anti-corrosion goop before putting them in the connector. Then I held onto the bolt with channel locks while he tightened the nut on the other end. Finally it had to be wrapped with a special type of tape, not the typical electrical tape (although he wrapped a layer of that as well).
Finally he installed all the breakers, including one for the new garage circuit (which we had started running wire for, see next page). I offered to clean up the mess while he finished the garage circuit, so I wouldn’t have to have him come back another day to complete the work.
Trench