Why Avoid Upsizing the Main Panel?

When homeowners consider electrification upgrades – adding heat pumps, EV chargers, heat pump water heaters, other electric appliances, or solar and storage systems – they’re sometimes told they need a main panel upgrade. What many people don’t realize is that it isn’t always necessary. The reality is most electrical services are larger than what homes actually use, and outdated approaches to electrification frequently trigger expensive, time-consuming panel upgrades that could be avoided.

In this video clip from our comprehensive course “Avoiding Main Panel Upgrades,” instructor Spencer Rosen breaks down exactly why avoiding these upgrades can make or break your projects.

Ready to learn the full toolkit of technologies, code interpretations, and design solutions? Enroll in the complete course to learn every approach to achieving whole-home electrification while keeping the existing electrical infrastructure intact.

Transcript below.

 So we talk about main panel upgrades… There’s really three reasons that we want to avoid them if possible. 

The first is that they’re really expensive. They cost a lot of money. 

The second is they can take a ton of time. They’re very time intensive. They can bog down a project. 

And the third is they have a huge grid impact.

So let’s dive deeper into the cost of creating a main electrical panel or service. So first off, if you’re just replacing the panel, it may cost a few thousand dollars up to $5,000, which isn’t necessarily a deal breaker. 

But sometimes because the panel might be over a gas meter, you have to move the panel to a new location, which requires special GFI breakers and can add significantly to the cost, anywhere from an additional $2000 to $10,000. 

From there, you might have to run a new service to get a larger wire, which sometimes the utilities will throw in for free, but often they’ll actually charge you for that cost of the electrical upgrade. 

If the wire was coming into the home underground, you might have to trench up the existing direct burial wire or conduit and install new conduit, and that can be very expensive. Sometimes you have to cut through concrete, existing landscaping. Sometimes you have to trench into the street to get to a transformer, and that can really elevate and jack up the price of the project. 

If the transformer needs to be upsized/upgraded, that can add another $10k, $20k, $30k – I’ve even seen up to $60,000 of total cost.

So if you look at the total cost for these projects, in the best case scenario, it’s going to be a few thousand dollars, which can be significant for a homeowner who’s thinking about electrification upgrades. But we’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars for some of the worst case scenarios, which can completely stall a project.

Let’s now talk about the time impact of getting a main service upgrade. The first step when you explore getting a main service or panel upgrade is to request a service order. To request a service order, you call your utility and they’ll send out a technician to evaluate the service. That can typically take anywhere from 30 to 90 days just for that first step.

Once they tell you what you can or cannot do and give you an opportunity to schedule the actual disconnect/reconnect, that can take another 30 to 60 days on top of that. Now a permit needs to be designed and approved. Sometimes that can be done in parallel. That can add another few days to up to 90 days if a local authority having jurisdiction has a delay there. A permit inspection needs to be scheduled. Sometimes that can take a long time. 

If a transformer needs to be ordered to increase the total supply to that region, to that area, to that neighborhood, there’s a worldwide transformer shortage that can take up to a year, or I’ve even seen beyond that, like up to two years, and then the installation could take a few days to a month.

All in all, best case scenario, we’re talking about a couple months. Worst case scenario, we’re talking about years to get more power to that specific location. You can see the real time intensive impact and the savings from a product timeline perspective that’s available when you can electrify or go solar and storage without the main panel upgrade.

The last big impact we’re going to talk about is the impact to the utility grid from upgrading main service panels.

Enroll in the Avoiding Main Panel Upgrades course to learn more!