Temporary power for tenants

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Tainted

Tainted

Senior Member
Location
New York
Occupation
Engineer (PE)
I am working on a building that has 60 tenants and we are doing an electrical upgrade. We plan to gut out the electrical room and replace it with a new switchboard and meter banks.

My question is:

As a rule of thumb based on your experiences, how long would the power shut down have to be in order to gut out and re-new the electrical room?

If it'll take a long time, how would you approach giving temporary power to all the 60 tenants if the old meter bank will be demolished? I want to install new meter bank in place where the old meter bank was installed. All of these tenants are not sub-metered, they all have their dedicated main meter.
 
Do you by chance have any pics?

We try to install the new service beside the old service. That allows us to do as much as possible before we cut power.
Not usually over one night.
Or hire some temp help to get it done very quick.
We have done the temp power a hundred different ways.
 
Like Buck said, if you have the room, and the AHJ will allow both gear to be simultaneously energized, moving over sections at a time at night while the stores are closed.
 
hillbilly1 said:
Like Buck said, if you have the room, and the AHJ will allow both gear to be simultaneously energized, moving over sections at a time at night while the stores are closed.
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These are not stores, these are residential tenants. We want to re-use the old electrical room and remove everything in there so that there is space for new electrical equipment but the question is how can we provide temporary power to the tenants? We want the new meter bank to be in the same wall where the old meter bank was installed.

Do we just install a temporary meter bank in some other location to power tenants until the old meter bank is demolished and new meter bank is installed?
 
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Tainted said:
I'm not sure if you're serious lol
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Actually, I was half-kidding and half-serious. Who would be bearing the cost either way, the owner? Price and present the options.

It might cost less than material and labor for a 60-unit temporary service, and would certainly reduce the pressure for you to rush.

If you have to keep the tenants home, the existing stacks are probably the best equipment to use as temporary, if it can be moved.
 
LarryFine said:
Actually, I was half-kidding and half-serious. Who would be bearing the cost either way, the owner? Price and present the options.

It might cost less than material and labor for a 60-unit temporary service, and would certainly reduce the pressure for you to rush.
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It's not really the cost that I'm worried about, it's about making people angry that they don't have their precious electricity for a while
 
petersonra said:
Forget the temporary meter bank. Just have the landlord pay The electric bill for however it takes to make the switch over.
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I was actually thinking of doing that but I wasn't sure how the client will feel about that, not sure how long they would have to pay their free electricity
 
Tainted said:
I was actually thinking of doing that but I wasn't sure how the client will feel about that, not sure how long they would have to pay their free electricity
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Figure out what the various options are, the costs, and how painful it will be for the tenants and talk to him about it.
 
You can get creative. I once replaced 2 sections of a 3 section switchboard (kept the metering section) with a 1000A panelboard. It was really hard to get shutdown time due to the critical nature of this facility, so I did nearly all of it live. I bolted on lugs to a joint in the bussing to feed th new gear and got that heated up. Then I would run a temporary cable to each panel and tie it in as a parallel feed, heat it up, them disconnect and reroute the permanent feed so I was able to do it without interruption. At the end I sawzalled off the bus bars that fed out to the 2 now unused sections and removed them.

All that said, things get a lot harder if the new gear needs to go in the same spot as the old. In that you are likely looking at moving things twice - once to a temp panel, and then again to the new gear. I agree with Mr Petersen, probably just forget trying to keep everyone metered separately throughout the whole thing. You can buy a big panelboard like a Siemens P4 that is loaded up with double 60 or 100A breakers (or whatever you need) for the temp feed. Maybe see if you can get utility demand data so you know what the actual load is.

Probably the best option is find some new space for the new gear/meter center.
 
I quoted a job similar to that years ago, it was a five story apartment complex, old Bulldog gear in the basement, no room left, over the years, they added chillers, a generator, and a loading dock ramp to that room. Tenants were not individually metered though. The only way to do it, was install the new gear outside at street level, and swap everything over during multiple days. Most of the tenants were college students. To compound the swap over, everything was in rigid.
 
Tainted said:
Do we just install a temporary meter bank in some other location to power tenants until the old meter bank is demolished and new meter bank is installed?
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If you must maintain the metering then this is the only real option because you want to reuse the space that hs the old equipment. A temp setup might even allow for electronic metering.
 
Could you move the existing service across the room? Then extend all the wires to it.

Do they have electric heat? Stove? Water heater electric?
You might talk to the poco engineer about installing a temp ct metering device then feed them all temporary out of a gutter.

Are you going to be using all EMT? Is it all EMT now?

Swing by and take then post a couple pics. I would really like to see it.
 
60 apartments probably don't use more than $100 a day of worth of electricity. How much is it going to cost to temporary in a set of meters for those 60 apartments
 
petersonra said:
60 apartments probably don't use more than $100 a day of worth of electricity. How much is it going to cost to temporary in a set of meters for those 60 apartments
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If those meters are provided by the POCO to individually bill each tenant then you probably cannot remove them even for a short period of time.
 
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