Electrical Panel Preventative Maintenance

[Michael Garofalo]

BP Community:

I recently received a call from my property management company stating the heat went out in one of my units. After a thorough investigation, the HVAC contractors determined there is nothing wrong with the furnace itself. The breaker tripped, was reset, and then tripped again, so the initial thought was that some component within the furnace was drawing too much power. Upon further investigation, they determined the breaker had been blown, and there was residual damage to the panel. What they believe happened was all of the deox (sp?) had dried up within the main wiring entering the box, which caused significant overheating. Long story short, I need to replace the entire panel because the damage caused was significant. The tenants still have power in the unit (i.e. other appliances and outlets are all working), but I don't want to neglect this and create a situation where a fire hazard may be present.

My question is: is there any type of preventative maintenance (i.e. periodically add deox/other chemicals to support conductivity) or inspections I should be doing as landlord on the panel every so often? I want to make sure this issue does not happen again as the repair cost for the entire panel is not insignificant. For reference, this property was an REO foreclosure that I performed an entire cosmetic rehab on. I did not touch any of the electrical, as this had been completely redone in 2006 by a previous developer.

[John Underwood]

@Michael Garofalo I am an Electrical Engineer, but not an electrician. I have never heard of residential properties doing PM's on a breaker panel. Large companies do sometimes exercise their breakers and conduct thermal imaging to see if any breakers are hotter than they should be compared to the other breakers.

Are the terminals in the panel burnt? If not maybe you could just replace some or all of the breakers.

I recently had the main breaker start tripping at a rental property but the downstream breakers were not tripping. The smaller breaker should have been tripping first that a load was connected to. This was an indication that the main breaker was failing and needed to be replaced. We did not have all the other breakers replaced as they were not failing. The breakers themselves are not all that expensive it is the labor that is the bulk of the expense. Replacing the entire breaker panel is much more expensive and labor intensive than replacing a few breakers.

You may want to get a second opinion on what is actually wrong and needs to be replaced.