Real World Prices- Upgrading Electrical Service

[Shawn Thom]

For newer people, I am posting some of the prices I am seeing to help them gauge and calculate prices.  Sometimes I get good prices, sometimes not.

When you are dealing with older house, you will often find they have a few electrical issues that need to be addressed to bring them into the 21st century.  In my example, I found 2 things.

#1- it had a Federal Pacific breaker box.  Those apparently can be a fire hazard.

#2- It had 100amp service.  I wanted to put in Central AC & an electric dryer plug.  100amp doesn't have enough juice to run a lot of big electrical things at once.  Since most people want to run their AC, run their dryer and watch TV at the same time I upgraded.

To give others a sense of prices if they run up against this, here are the options that my electrician gave me:

replace existing 100amp service with new panel   $900

Upgrade from 100am service to 200amp service.  This included raising the existing electrical line to the new height requirements, a new conduit riser, and service head (I may have those names wrong).  there were some other odds and ends to make the connections up to code= $2500

I also added 2 lines.  1 30amp line and plug for the dryer and 1 40amp line for the outside AC unit.  He charged me $400 for those.  Both had a pretty long run.

I think I got average pricing on the service upgrade and a pretty good price on the dryer and AC line additions.

PS, just for info, if I had a 200amp service already and a problematic breaker box, replacing that 200amp break box would have been around $1200.