Panel replacement for worn, full or fuse-era panels, and panel upgrades to 200 amps. The loads added up first, and the power company booked by us, across Portland, Sherwood, Wilsonville, and surrounding communities.
The panel is the metal box where power from the street splits into your home's circuits, with one breaker guarding each circuit. A panel replacement swaps that box and every breaker in it for new ones. When the house also needs more power than its service delivers, the job becomes a panel upgrade: the new panel is larger, and the service feeding it is raised to match — in Portland, most often to 200 amps.
Some panels are replaced whatever their size. A fuse box has no breakers to reset. Inspectors flag two brands, Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco, and we replace those rather than repair them. Others have simply run out of room: every space is full, breakers are doubled up, and there is nowhere to land the circuit for a new kitchen, a heat pump or a charger.
While the panel is open we also look for what a new one has to put right: two wires under one breaker screw, grounding that once ran to a metal water pipe since replaced with plastic, wire too small for the breaker it sits on, and scorch marks at the connections. Each one goes on the written estimate, so you can see what the new panel fixes. Those finds are one reason two estimates on the same street can differ; what moves the price of a panel upgrade walks through the rest.
Your power company has to cut the house off before the old panel can come out. Depending on the address that is PGE or Pacific Power — much of north-east Portland is on Pacific Power, most of the rest of the city on PGE. We pull the permit and book the disconnect and the reconnect with them, so the only call you make is to us. Gresham is all PGE, and we do the same job there: see panel upgrades in Gresham.
