What main service panels involves

The service is where the building meets the grid. Everything else is downstream. The work starts with finding out what is actually there. With main service panels, that means looking at the existing wiring, the panel capacity and whatever the last person left behind.

We tell you what we find before we tell you what it costs. If the scope is smaller than you expected, it gets smaller. That happens more often than people assume.

Where this comes up

Services, switchgear, transformers and the distribution behind the meter. Most of these calls come from Des Plaines and the surrounding suburbs, but we take them anywhere in our service area.

New load on old wiring is the most common version. A heat pump or a charger for the car goes in, the circuits that were fine until then start complaining, and the real question becomes whether the existing service can carry it at all.

How we do it

We protect the floors, keep the mess contained and haul out what we remove. The work itself goes in to code, and where a permit applies, it gets pulled and inspected.

What we see go wrong

Most of the bad work we find was not done by an electrician. It was a handyman, a previous owner or somebody who watched a video. Backstabbed outlets, undersized conductors, missing grounds, neutrals and grounds bonded in a subpanel, junctions buried inside a wall with no box.

None of that is visible from the living room. It surfaces during a remodel, a home inspection, or the day a breaker stops holding.

What happens when we are done

The last part of every job is the part people do not see: testing each circuit we touched and marking the panel so each breaker says what it actually feeds. When you need to shut something off in a hurry, a correct label saves you guessing.

Where a permit was pulled you get the closed inspection. Where documentation exists, you get it.

Code, permits and inspection

Unincorporated areas usually fall under the county for permits instead of a village. The process, the paperwork and the inspection schedule can all differ, so the first question on any permitted job is simply who has jurisdiction at that address.

We deal with whichever jurisdiction the job sits in. We pull the permit, we schedule the inspection, and we are there when the inspector walks it. You get the paperwork at the end, which matters when you sell the building or when an insurer asks.

Copper, aluminum and what is in your walls

Aluminum branch wiring went into a lot of houses in the late sixties and early seventies. It is not automatically dangerous, but it expands and contracts more than copper, which loosens terminations over time, and it needs devices and connectors rated for it.

The repair is usually not a full rewire. Proper connectors at every termination, done thoroughly, solves most of it. Anybody quoting you a whole-house rewire on sight has not looked.

What to do before we arrive

If an outlet or switch is sparking or scorched, leave it alone and turn off its breaker. Do not pull the plug from a device that is visibly burning at the receptacle. Keep people and pets out of that room until we get there.

Leave the affected circuit off if it smells hot or keeps tripping. Otherwise, just remember what you were using when it acted up.

Service size is a ceiling on everything

The service is the limit every other circuit lives under. A 100-amp service was generous when houses had one air conditioner and a gas range. Add electric cooking, a heat pump, a car charger and a finished basement and it stops being enough.

Upgrading means coordinating with ComEd, replacing the meter socket and mast, and sizing the new panel for what the building will need in ten years rather than exactly what it needs today.