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Your Main Electrical Service

oldflame

oldflame

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
Since we, essentially, listen to the power supplies in our amps and many, here, use extensive conditioning/filtering and dedicated breakers/wiring to our stereos, what do we know about our dwelling's electrical system?

Improper grounds, loose screws/connections, unbalanced loads, and breakers that haven't been exercised or removed occasionally to clean the stabs, all can negate downstream attempts to supply good AC. In many cases the local AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) is almost non-existent, overworked, lax, or not current with the latest NEC requirements. Some AK's members have gone well beyond the average installation and I'd bet some of us are blissfully unaware.

It would be interesting to know what others have encountered or found to be unusual with their AC systems. I'll offer the first volley: my house is 108 years old and has some knob & tube, threaded metal pipe, conduit, BX, Romex, Sealtite, and the silver-coated NM that preceded Romex. Can you imagine, or beat, all of that?
 
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Our house is 6 yrs old and the previous owners built it to be "off-grid" in the future. We have our own transformer and the pole is right next to a 14' x 18' out building, this is were the batteries and contols will reside. A 200 amp service goes into the building and the main house (740sqft) is feed from a 100 amp subpanel on the side of the house with a breaker panel in the kitchen. When we moved in I checked all the outlets, they used quality outlets so they were not changed. I also serviced all the panels, disconnected all wires, No Ox-Id on all the "joints" and torqued.

No issues at all so just did some maintenance.

In 1991 I completely redid (This Old House style) our house that was built in 1889.
 
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Our house is a vintage 2003 "Mc Mansion wannabe". When we bought it from Fanny Mae 8 years ago it had a couple of rooms with wiring issues. This kept anything computer related from working. Not good for my Son the Graphic Artist and his workstations. So, I had the electrical inspected & overhauled by a local reputable electrician.

Mark Gosdin
 
In 2006 we remodeled the kitchen which required a new 200 amp circuit breaker box and new wiring to the emergency Box from the Transformer on the power pole and then on to the circuit breakers which were all new. I had 5 20 amp circuits in greenfield and number 10 wire installed. One for the dis play and 3 for the for the HT system and one for the stereo system. All are on the same phase and are all home runs, too. No Splices or junction boxes. El Paso Electricity supplies the power via natural gas power turbines and supplemented with power from Palo Verde Nuclear Power. No coal or heavy fuel oil used in this area. We are not on the Grid with the rest of Texas east of the Pecos River. So a couple years a go when Texas was in big trouble do to the extremely cold winter weather we were enjoying very nice weather and plenty of electrical and natural gas power to keep our homes warm and businesses in full operation.10 years previously we had our turn for cold weather which did things just a bit, but we all made thru with only few homes having plumbing issues do to outdoor pipes being exposed or not being buried deep enough in the ground. We stayed home not wanting to deal with all the black ice on the streets. Thats where we came up short. Our streets not being taken care of by the highway department properly.
 
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My house was built in 1954, and I really need to rewire it. Fortunately, the builder (the family who lived in it until the 1990s, and who built most of the rest of the neighborhood on spec) was an early adopter of the then-new plastic insulated Romex wiring, so at least I don't have to worry about the old early fiber insulation crumbling and falling off, running the risk of setting everything on fire. The downside is that I have very few actual grounded outlets, the house in general needs more circuits, and I need to bring the service up to at least 200A from 100A. The living room, family room, basement, and master bedroom will both be getting a couple of dedicated 20A circuits for audio and/or home theater use, along with the standard circuitry for things like lamps.
 
Mid 50s, but the electrical service was updated about 15 years ago. 200 amp main service entrance with a new drop from the pole, meters, etc. Also appropriate stuff for the solar setup to back-feed the grid.

The 200 amp panel is in the front workshop area. There is a 100 amp sub-panel in the house replacing the old fuse box. Another 100 amp sub in the garage, and a 60 sub in the back shed. The house does still have some old wiring, but its 1950s vintage NM (non-metallic, Romex). Cloth outer wrap with PVC insulated copper wires with a ground inside. I've done the best I can to make sure its wired right and every outlet in the house is a grounded type with a verified working ground.

Wiring in the front room where my stereo stuff lives, workshop, front garage, and the back shed are all new within the last 15 years. Fair bits of the house have been re-wired too, but I haven't been inside of every wall.


when we moved in there were 2 meters and a total of 6 fuse boxes. House was a 60 amp service using the classic 2 cartridges and 4 glass fuse box everyone has seen. Wired in above the main fuse was one box for the AC and one for the water heater. The neutral was also bad, so when things turned on, some lights got dim and some got bright. The second service fed the workshop which was just 4 glass fuses. That basically ran some lights and the well pump. I believe that was a 30 amp service, 120v only. There were 2 boxes fed into the garage, not quite sure what they were doing originally because the wiring leaving the boxes was all gone.
 
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mgosdin said:
Our house is a vintage 2003 "Mc Mansion wannabe". When we bought it from Fanny Mae 8 years ago it had a couple of rooms with wiring issues. This kept anything computer related from working. Not good for my Son the Graphic Artist and his workstations. So, I had the electrical inspected & overhauled by a local reputable electrician. Mark Gosdin
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That's interesting, Mark. We're you able to find out any details about the wiring problems interfering with your PC's?

Has anyone dealt with knob & tube and what was your solution? My first floor receptacles were easy enough to re-wire but I'm considering running a pipe through one of the balloon-walls to the second floor, for a sub-panel, and spreading out from there.
 
Sgt Shultz said:
I'm a licensed Master Electrician since 1986, enough said.
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so the house is wired with old extension cords and pennies in the fuse panel? :)

kind of seems to be two options when people are in a trade for a living, either their stuff is over-designed and extremely well built, or its a falling apart mess that they just don't feel like dealing with even though they know better.

oldflame said:
Has anyone dealt with knob & tube and what was your solution? My first floor receptacles were easy enough to re-wire but I'm considering running a pipe through one of the balloon-walls to the second floor, for a sub-panel, and spreading out from there.
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I've kind of become the caretaker for the local Elks lodge. It was built in 1924 and some of it's original electrical wiring is still in place and in use. Seems like folks in the past have "dealt" with it by randomly abandoning stuff, sometimes with wires just poking out of places. Some is really old, some much more modern, and not all of it is dead. Lots of fun pulling a ceiling tile and being faced with live wires without wire nuts just sticking out of a junction box. The fuse box feeding the old K&T is one of those really ancient jobs with fused neutrals and knife switches. I had to get into that a few weeks ago to shut something off, let me tell you I have never been so careful turning something off in my life.
 
gadget73 said:
so the house is wired with old extension cords and pennies in the fuse panel? :)

kind of seems to be two options when people are in a trade for a living, either their stuff is over-designed and extremely well built, or its a falling apart mess that they just don't feel like dealing with even though they know better.



I've kind of become the caretaker for the local Elks lodge. It was built in 1924 and some of it's original electrical wiring is still in place and in use. Seems like folks in the past have "dealt" with it by randomly abandoning stuff, sometimes with wires just poking out of places. Some is really old, some much more modern, and not all of it is dead. Lots of fun pulling a ceiling tile and being faced with live wires without wire nuts just sticking out of a junction box. The fuse box feeding the old K&T is one of those really ancient jobs with fused neutrals and knife switches. I had to get into that a few weeks ago to shut something off, let me tell you I have never been so careful turning something off in my life.
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Some pics

A panel I replaced
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The basement of a house here in FL I built the service for, the customer decided he wanted the panels relocated to a different room than the service main and the reason for the massive gutter and all the conduit.
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Mine was built in 1958 with all redwood construction. No rot anywhere after all these years! Originally it was wired without grounded power outlets. Now, after all these years, its an add hock mix of both. On top of that I had solar installed.
 
According to my Panamax power center on my main system our incoming voltage tends to run generally anywhere from about 113 (heavy use days when everyone is running their AC full blast) to 117. Only rarely do I see it up to 120V. Last year we added a full solar system and I had hoped that we'd see 120V more consistently, but there has been no change. Apparently the utility company still manages to regulate even the electricity coming off of the roof. To be fair, I haven't seen any detrimental effects of the low line voltage (except at our old house where my tube preamp wouldn't come out of warm-up when it was only getting 113V. Doesn't seem to be the case at this house - yet another thing I don't understand), but it still makes me go "hmm".
 
Great pics: one extreme to the other. Gadget, that old panel beats anything I've seen - cartridge fuses! Sarge, were you upgrading a European castle? Lapslah, thanks for including your voltages; that's another interesting topic knowing what we all experience for our dwellings: is it stable or vary like you mentioned? Your low voltage is something I never experience because ours stays close to 121 - 123v.
 
oldflame said:
Great pics: one extreme to the other. Gadget, that old panel beats anything I've seen - cartridge fuses! Sarge, were you upgrading a European castle? Lapslah, thanks for including your voltages; that's another interesting topic knowing what we all experience for our dwellings: is it stable or vary like you mentioned? Your low voltage is something I never experience because ours stays close to 121 - 123v.
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New 35,000 sqft house on Palm Beach, we work on much larger homes, currently one that's 80,000. The customer purchased 5 mansions over 40,000, tore down 4, left the other as a base of operations while building his complex, it will be torn down eventually.

We also wired the Divosta Towers


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