October 25, 2008

Try explaining this to your wife. "Honey, I am adding 4 switches to the 2 that were there"

The new subpanel with all the circuits I have added thus far, more coming soon.

A Closer view

Installed and ready to go

This project was a dream of mine that I didn't see happening at this house. I of course would love to completely overhaul all of the electrical circuits in the house but this is a far cry from possibly running only a single additional circuit for our office, and having the water heater installed.

The house has a 100 Amp main panel that is mostly utilized, but I wanted to add dedicated circuits in each room for space heaters, air conditioners, computers, christmas lights, and everything else that might get thrown at it. There were also areas like hallways, the basement, and outdoors that I wanted to add power to. There were only 2 useable slots in the existing panel and we are converting the water heater from propane to electric, so there goes that theory.

After some online research and talking to knowledgeable people I decided a subpanel was the best route of expansion, I could add as many circuits as I wanted to (within reason) and connect it to the main panel. There were some serious points to ponder, especially with our budget. The circuits I am adding really need to be on a 100 Amp panel, and the main panel is a 100 Amp panel so to do it right we should have upgraded the main panel to 200 Amp, but we are going to see if this will work for now, it acts like a really big 100 Amp main panel.

Of course the hard decission was, do we hire an electrician? For all the work that was done the cost of a normal electrician would have been near $4000. My online research and materials came to about $400. Every step of the way I kept thinking, "I can do this part, but maybe we should hire out the next part". Before you knew it, there was a subpanel feeding all the new circuits running fine. I do have to stress that there are extreme dangers and safety consideration when you work with the panels. The main panel is always live at the lugs, and on subpanels you must isolate the ground and neutral bars, otherwise your grounds can carry current back to your appliances.