The Cottage was built in 1959. At some point, the previous owners added on a bedroom, and when they did that, they moved the electrical drop and added a new breaker box with a meter:
They added a 100A breaker, which feeds the original panel in the house, but (stupidly, IMHO), they didn’t add a main disconnect breaker:
I would like to add a 15A breaker to this outdoor panel, to run a mini-split. But:
As far as I can tell, there’s no way to shut the power off, which means I’d have to work on the panel live, which I am not keen on doing, although I think I could if I had to.
It appears that there is no overload protection of the outdoor panel. What’s to stop someone (me) from adding another 100A breaker? What will trip if the service drop capacity is exceeded? Or, will something just melt?
There is some code that says no more than 6 shutoffs per panel with no main disconnect. If I add a 2-pole breaker, does that count as 6 (is the existing 100A breaker 1)?
How do I find out what the service drop is rated for? There’s no information that I can see on the panel, and for that matter, I’m not even sure what breakers it takes.
Get rid of that panel and install a new one w/ master circuit breaker. It’s not hard to do.
I did something similar a few years ago. I “pulled” the watthour meter to de-energize the breaker box. On mine, the big, round, watthour meter was simply socketed into a receptacle. I removed the ring, pulled on it, and it came off. See steps 9 and 10 here. Not sure if yours is the same design, though.
I would also check to make sure that they separated the neutral and the safety grounds in the old main panel (which is now a sub-panel and requires separate neutral and safety ground buses). If they didn’t. that would be a good indication that the work was never inspected.
Yes, there is no direct way for you to shut off power to the exposed bus bars. You could break the tamper seal and pull the meter, but your utility will frown on that. However, you do have smart meter and those often include a remote-shutoff ability (mainly used for disconnecting non-payers). You can try calling your utility and asking if they’ll open the meter disconnect remotely for you.
2.Also correct, there is no single point of overload protection in a “rule of six” panel. It is entirely possible to overload the service wires and/or bus bars. It is critical to perform a load calculation when adding circuits.
Yes, the rule of six is a thing. The rule is "no more than six hand movements to shut everything off, so two-pole breakers and one-pole breakers both count as requiring one “hand movement”. You can even add a handle-tie to two adjacent but unrelated single-pole breakers (as long as you don’t mind having to turn them off together) to keep the number of throws under the limit. You could have up six single-pole breakers, six two-pole breakers, or twelve single-pole breakers with ever pair handle-tied - or various combinations - and still be compliant. You are currently at five throws, so you can add one more - adding another two-pole is compliant in that respect.
As far as service size, there are several factors. First, what your utility is willing to give you - limited by current local transformer capacity and the size of the wires to your house. Call your utility and ask them what your service size is. Utilities follow their own rules (not the NEC) so if they may be able to give you a service upgrade (say from 100A to 125A or 125A to 150A) without running new service wires. The meter is also a limiting factor but you already have a 200A meter and base (“CL200”), so that isn’t likely to be a bottleneck here. The wires from the meter to your bus bars looks like it might be bigger than the #2 XHHW aluminum 100A feeder that goes inside, so it might be capable of more than 100A (especially if it’s copper) but no markings are visible in the photo to confirm. Finally, the panel bus bars - there should be a label somewhere on the panel that says what the bus bars can handle.
Your panel is GE (now branded ABB). The breaker type is THQL. Perfectly safe with no history of issues (unlike many other brands) and still actively supported and sold.
Thank you.
That is very helpful.
I emailed LPEA and asked about the service capacity, and they said they would get back to me during normal business hours (Mon-Thurs, LOL).
Judging by the sheer amount of rust on the panel cover, the work looks old enough that it could have been done when it was still legal to run a three-wire feed to a sub-panel and mix grounds and neutral there (although the picture is unclear, it does look like it might be a four-wire feed).
Regardless the basic point stands: even if it was a legally-done three-wire feeder install with mixed neutrals and grounds in the sub-panel it should be upgraded now because three-wire feeds are unsafe (a broken neutral/ground in the feeder electrifies all the bare downstream grounds!).
Friend of mine once was trying to repair a broken receptacle, had turned off the breaker, and while stripping the wire to attach the new receptable, a giant spark ate a quarter inch round chunk out of his knife blade. A few months later, tenants in his house started a minor electrical fire while they had the outlest uncovered painting a room. Fire department investigated, and the live and neutral were wired backward. For a 20-year-old house, generally nobody had a clue before that.
Something that amateurish like your panel, better be sure it really is wired correctly.
When they had to repair the feed wires to my old house, there was a switch (looked like a knife switch) on the pole that they could turn off and on with a long pole. (Where the wires went into the house bent at the mast pole, the insulation had cracked and bare metal was visible -either new wire or the cheap fix was wrap with electrical tape.)
I’m fairly with electrical devices, but I would call an electrician on this one.
[hijack] One day I discovered that a wall switch that broke looked like it dated from the 1920s or even earlier. So I bought enough new switches to replace them all, waited for a bright sunny day, turned off the main power and replaced them all. They were all different all very dated. The house was built in 1942 and I assume that new switches were simply unavailable and they scrounged for what they could find.[/hijack]
There is no way I would work on a panel without a positive disconnect that I could physically verify (and preferably lockout) while I was working. What can be turned off remotely can be turned on remotely. Even if this were possible, I would doubt the utility would do this for anyone for the purpose of de-energizing a circuit for repairs.
When the electrician was fixing the wire feed to the mast on my house, it was an employee of the electrical utility that came out to turn the power off and then on. I assume for liability, safety, and assurance of proper procedures, they don’t just let anyone do that.
