Real World Prices- Upgrading Electrical Service
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.