Upgrading the electrical service to your home is the most important step in modernizing and improving the safety of your homes electrical system.
Our electrical service upgrade package normally includes replacing everything from the service panel to where your house is connected to WE Energies. This includes the service riser or mast, the meter socket and the panel box itself.
The first step in upgrading your service is to have our service advisor come to your home to give a written proposal of the required work. The advisor will examine your present electrical service to ensure that your new electrical service will support your needs. It is important to tell the advisor about other problems with the electrical system in the house, such as blowing fuses or tripping circuit breakers. It may be necessary to add additional circuits to solve these problems.
To satisfy electrical code requirements, additional work may be required. If there are any major code violations, they should be repaired. Also the space in front of the main service panel must be cleared. The code requires that a clearance of 30 inches wide by 36 inches deep be maintained in front of the circuit breaker panel and electric meter.
Please let the service advisor know if you are planning other remodeling work now or in the near future. If you plan to add a major appliance, hot tub, swimming pool, deck, or similar equipment, there may be a need to increase the capacity of your electrical service. We also would like to know if we need to coordinate our work with other contractors working on your home. Many times having us help you with coordinating contractors, we can save you money, time and aggravation.
You may also want to consider adding whole house surge protection if you have large investments in home entertainment systems or computers in the house. Square D offers the Surgebreaker secondary surge arrester that is installed in your new panel box. This device protects your home’s electrical system and hardwired appliances from surges up to 20,000 volts.
Point-of-use surge suppressors that are purchased at home improvement stores normally only handle surges up to 6,000 volts, and only protect the products plugged directly into them. For the best protection of sensitive electronics like computers, you need both levels of protection.
Square D also has the latest innovation in surge protection, the Surgebreaker Plus. This device provides whole house protection not only for the electrical panel and home wiring, but also for up to four telephone lines and two coax cable lines.
At the end of the visit, the service advisor will give you a written proposal for the required work. The proposal will include the cost of the service upgrade, along with any repairs required to satisfy code requirements. This proposal will include all labor, material and permit costs.
Once this proposal is accepted, our office will schedule a day to perform the work. You can anticipate that the home will be without power for about five hours. We will typically have two electricians work on the project and will be there for most of the day.
If there are any critical systems in the house that must be powered, please let us know. We can supply power to these critical systems while we upgrade the service.
Prior to us coming to your home please be sure to provide space for us to work. We ask that you provide a clean and safe working environment for our workers.
Once we are finished with the service upgrade, our office or the electrical inspector will be contacting you to determine when it will be convenient for the inspector to inspect our work. The inspector will review the work performed and if there are any issues, he will notify both you and Best Electric Service. Once the electrical inspector approves the work performed, WE Energies will come and inspect the wire from the pole to your house. If they determine that the wire needs to be replaced, your house will be without electrical power for about 15 minutes. Typically, there is no charge for this work, except for underground services.
In many cases, the new conduit and meter socket on the outside of your house will not cover the area where the old equipment was located. There may be a need to hire a siding contractor to patch any gaps that are present.
In rare cases, in the weeks following the service upgrade you may experience a few tripped circuits. The reason for this is when the new service panel is installed some circuits may be protected by a smaller circuit breaker than was originally installed. This is done to satisfy the electrical code. Our electricians try to look for this during the installation process, but if you experience this, we will need to return and split up the troublesome circuit by adding additional circuits.
The current electrical codes provide safety improvements to the electrical system. With these safety improvements many insurance companies will lower home insurance rates. Likewise, some companies will not offer insurance for homes without circuit breakers. You may want to notify your insurance company that you upgraded your electrical service to determine if there might be any savings.
We use Square D™ QO™ series load centers and circuit breaker panels. Square D is the leader in circuit protection, a reputation QO Load Centers helped to build. They have the widest range of products, superior reliability and durability, exclusive performance innovations such as fast-acting Quik_Open™ protection and Visi-Trip™ indication and advanced technologies including ground fault circuit interruption (GFCI), arc fault circuit interruption and surge protection.
Square D warrants its single phase load centers to be free from defects in material and workmanship for a period of ten years from the date of installation. Square D warrants its branch circuit breakers to be free from defects in material and workmanship for the lifetime of the main panel.
If you have any questions, please ask your service advisor or call our office.
