New Electric Panel

Well, after putting it off for the 7 years since we moved in, it was time.

I'd known for a while that these old "pushmatic" electric panels were troublesome, and I'd had two or three start tripping well under what should be their load limit. But what made me pull the trigger was that the 100A breaker that feeds our garage subpanel tripped one day, and I found that one leg of the 240V circuit was no longer working. As the Tesla charger is on the garage subpanel, it was not happy about half of its voltage missing and would not power on.

So I enlisted my friend Tom who is a general contractor and a great electrician (and carpenter and sound guy and a host of other things). I took the day off work to help him and figured I'd also swap out the hot water heater which had been leaking.

From the few progress pics you can see how much cleaner it all looks than the old mess! I was happy to also integrate the generator disconnect into the main panel rather than having a separate panel which only serviced a few circuits. Now I can power anything I need to (within the generator's 50A limit) when the power is out... which is annoyingly often. And, we even got to try it out the very next day because we had a storm which took the power out for a good 12 hours or so.