In this episode, John Maher interviews Joe Malone, a master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, about critical aspects of electrical panels and circuit breakers. Joe explains code requirements, the importance of upgrading outdated fuse panels, and choosing the right panel size for new or expanding homes. He also covers common issues like water damage in breaker boxes, troubleshooting techniques, and the rise of smart panels that allow homeowners to monitor and control energy use remotely. For more information, visit Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical.
John Maher: Hi, I am John Maher and I’m here with Joe Malone, master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, an HVAC and electrical contractor in Marstons Mills Massachusetts on Cape Cod, focused on detail, quality, and professionalism. Today our topic is electrical panels and circuit breakers. Welcome, Joe.
Joe Malone: Hey, John.
How Do You Ensure Electrical Panels and Circuit Breakers Meet Current Codes and Regulations?
Maher: Yeah, so Joe, how do you ensure that electrical panels and circuit breakers meet current code requirements?
Malone: So, these days, the electrical panels are quite different from what they were in the past. You’re not allowed to have any fuse panels. Some of those, if they’re still around, they’re the old circle fuses. You screw in, screw out, and if they pop, you have to grab a new one and screw it back into place-
Maher: Yeah, I had those in my house when I grew up, all the fuses that, yeah, they’d be blowing all the time and we’d be down there and screwing new ones in.
Malone: Yep. And one of the old tricks was to stick a penny behind it and screw that in because it’s a piece of copper that’ll never pop.
Maher: Not a good idea.
Malone: Then you have the other problem.
Maher: Then your wire melts, right?
Malone: Yeah, exactly. And nowadays, you have to do the newer circuit breakers that you reset and you can turn them on and turn them off if they trip and have an overload. They’re just easily resettable. You find the problem, reset it, and have a great day.
Diagnosing Circuit Breaker Problems
Maher: You do need to diagnose and find the problem though, right? Not just continually like, oh, I’m just going to flip that again, or maybe I’ll tape that shut so it stays open or something like that. That’d be bad.
Malone: Yeah, exactly. Turn it on and turn it off until it blows up enough to stay on.
Maher: Yeah, right.
Malone: Yeah, we don’t recommend that.
What to Consider when Choosing an Electrical Panel
Maher: What factors should be considered when you’re choosing a panel? Maybe you’ve got a new house or maybe you are replacing a panel. What do you have to consider when you’re choosing the size of a panel?
Malone: So, the size of the panel, especially if it’s a new home, there are minimum requirements. It’s generally based on the square footage of your home. There’s a full math calculation that we have to go through and do based on the size of your home and what you’re going to have in it if you have an electric dryer, an electric stove if you have a hot tub, a pool, those all add up and they all draw a certain demand that’s amperage and then that’s the rating of the main circuit breaker.
There’s bare minimums that are required based on all those math calculations. And then generally when you’re doing a new home, you try to explore future expansion. Give people a little bit of room. If they ever think they’re going to put an addition on the home, add a garage, get a pool down the road when they have some more money to put into some fund instead of just the basics.
If they ever want to add a car charger for an electric vehicle, if they think they may want to have central air, maybe they built a house a little bit more budget-friendly, and now they’re going to put in air conditioning or heat pumps. It’s all things to consider moving forward.
When to Consider Upgrading an Electrical Panel
Maher: When might it be necessary to upgrade your electrical panel? And especially like you said these days with so many electronic devices and people adding car chargers and things like that to their home and everybody’s charging their laptops and their phones and whatever, when does it become necessary that you might need to upgrade your electrical panel?
Malone: So, one of the big ones, and especially where we are a heat pump HVAC contractor here on Cape Cod, one of the big ones we run into is people’s homes were built to the bare minimum, which totally fine, safe, nothing wrong with it, based on fossil fuel burning. They’re burning natural gas or propane or oil, which takes extremely little electricity. It just burns the fossil fuel, creates heat and everybody’s happy.
Nowadays, there’s a major electrification happening with the utility companies giving significant rebates on installation of high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment. They draw electricity. And the newer ones are better than they were 5 or 10 years ago, but they still draw a significant amount of electricity.
So, once we do that, we have to do an evaluation of the home, see what the existing power service is on the house, and if they have multiple things like an electric water heater, an electric stove, an electric dryer, if you want to go and add the electric heat pump to it, that’s going to require us to bump up the availability of power to the home in order to safely handle all of the electrical draw that’s going on the home now.
How Many Amps are Needed?
Maher: Talk a little bit about the different amps that you have for an electrical panel. I know a lot of older houses maybe had a 60-amp panel if I’m saying that right. And then they’ve bumped up to like 100-amp, and now I think there’s even 200-amp service that you can get to your home. Can you just go ahead and you have have 100-amp service to your home, you can just replace the electrical panel and now you’ve got 200, or what’s the process there for upgrading?
Malone: Back when the homes were first built, there was very little electricity being used. You had a few lights here and there, and maybe you had a refrigerator. Nowadays, there’s significantly more. So back when those homes were first initially built, they had maybe a 60-amp service that had five fuses sitting in it. And now you work into having 100-amp is very few and far between, especially for a brand new home. Because of electrification, you are going to have a lot of heating and cooling, electric vehicles, so you might have a 125 or 150-amp. Those are less common.
More common now is a 200-amp electrical panel, which sounds significantly huge compared to the original 60-amp that grandma might’ve had in her home or you had in your home growing up. Because again, the demand for the electric has increased multiple times over. Some of the bigger homes around can actually have a 400-amp service, which it seems ridiculous, but some of the homes are drawing it, they’re pulling that amount of power, or there’s a large footprint. There’s 10,000 square feet on some of these summer houses down here on Cape Cod, and some people just have a lot of electricity needs in their homes.
How to Upgrade to a Bigger Electrical Service?
Maher: Do you have to do anything other than just replace the panel? Do you have to go to the electric company and say, Hey, I need to increase from 100 amps to 200-amp service, like the amount of power that’s actually coming to the home?
Malone: Yes. So, coming from the telephone pole, you’ll either have wires going underground through pipes and into your home or overhead across your driveway, and then coming down the side of your house. Those wires have to be checked out by the power company’s engineering department. They will come out and do an assessment. Sometimes they just do it from their office because they have good notes and good pictures of what they have for existing wiring. They’ll determine if there’s enough power available.
And then we have to run new wiring to connect to the power company’s wiring, which sometimes is through pipes underground. Sometimes you have to dig up a trench and put new pipes in, bigger wires to handle that. Sometimes it’s running wires up the side of the house to get to that overhead connection from the telephone pole, brand new meter socket, which is where the electric company’s meter sits on the side of your home.
And even still with that, it’s a much larger piece. You’ll go from a small 12-inch by 12-inch square that has your electrical meter in it to now some of them are two feet tall because there’s a main circuit breaker on them now. One of the big changes in our last cycle of our electrical code for safety reasons, is there’s now a main disconnect shutoff switch on the side here that needs to be a new shutoff switch on the side of your home.
That’s meant for if there’s ever an emergency at the house, the firefighters can come up and just kill the power to the whole house knowing that it makes it entirely safe and they don’t have to worry about hurting themselves. And they don’t have to wait for the power company to come shut off power before they fight the fire.
What are Common Breaker Panel Problems?
Maher: What are some of the typical electrical panel and breaker problems that you see and how do you diagnose and fix those?
Malone: So right now, one of the issues that I see from time to time ends up being water. Water getting into where it doesn’t belong. Water and electricity do not mix. So again, it’s some of the older homes, the older wiring, some of the enclosures… especially we have a lot of salt air around here, which tends to eat up and corrode and rust out that electric meter box on the side of your house. Water will find its way in, get into where the circuit breakers are, and again, water and electricity don’t get along. A lot of little hotspots will happen, things will start rusting out.
Once you have any kind of rust on an electrical connection or corrosion on an electrical connection, it just makes it harder for the electricity to flow where it belongs. So now you’re creating a hotspot and that just makes that worse and it compounds itself over and over.
You get people will call where half the house doesn’t work because part of that breaker just finally gave up and now you only have half the electricity running through your house or certain circuits won’t work. Which again, over time, if you’ve found one circuit breaker, you’ve reset it 10, 20, 30 times over the last couple of years. It’s a mechanical device that turns on and off and like everything else, mechanical, it will give up at a certain point.
So, there’s a little bit of diagnosis and it basically starts with a visual inspection and then we just take things apart and figure it out from there. Let’s start chasing a problem. Where do I have power? Where don’t I have power? Can start separating. If we know there’s 10 outlets connected to one circuit breaker, maybe we’ll start at the fifth outlet, separate the wiring and start turning on circuit breakers, and go back and forth. Sometimes it’s the circuit breaker itself. So just simply having us troubleshoot inside of that breaker panel, taking wires off, and finding out, hey, the circuit breaker is just the bad thing, we just need to replace this and everything’s good.
Are Smart Electrical Panels Popular?
Maher: Okay. Do you find yourself installing any smart electrical panels now? People are setting up smart homes and wanting to control or monitor their electricity usage and things like that. Have you had any experience with smart panels?
Malone: Yeah, there’s a few companies… there’s one major manufacturer out there Leviton right now, who has a smart circuit breaker panel and their technology is actually growing in leaps and bounds. I think they’re actually ahead of getting their UL approvals, but they do have the technology out where you can individually see when your dishwasher’s drawing too much power or one circuit on your house pulling too much power. And you can tell it to turn it off remotely to avoid having a problem or anything along those lines.
There are smaller companies out there which are also growing exponentially fast, where they have certain pieces and parts that will tie on to your existing power circuits. And you can again, remotely through an app or a smartphone monitor what’s going on with that. So, you can see if your refrigerator is drawing too much power, maybe there’s something going on with it. You can monitor and see how much power is my electric car actually drawing? Does it match what the car is telling me it’s drawing, or is it pulling extra power and wasting? Did I leave the pool pump on? Is the hot tub running for no reason when nobody’s home? You can start to dive in. Some people like the extra information, some people get annoyed by it. So, there’s something for everyone.
Maher: It depends on what type of person you are and how much detail you need to know, right?
Malone: Exactly, right.
Maher: Right. All right, well that’s really great information, Joe. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Malone: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Information About Cape Cod Heating Pumps and Electrical
Maher: And for more information, you can visit the Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical website at ccheatpumps.com or call 508-833-HVAC. That’s 508-833-4822.
