My company is stuck in an interesting situation, we have been in our rented building for the past 17 years. We are a builder of industrial machinery, the voltage and amperage loads on our building are constantly different depending on the equipment that we are building. Our current service panel is 480volts 225 amps, with 480 amps worht of breakers in it. There is a secondary distribution panel that is fed from the main panel with an 80A breaker, but the secondary distribution panel has multiple breakers (see attached Distribution Layout jpeg
totalling 430amps. So far to my knowledge we have not tripped the main breaker in the building, but now we need to add a new air compressor replacing the old one. The old air compressor is only breakered at 40 amps. The new compressor is going to be 60hp + additional loads for drying equipment. If i am correct the FLC per NEC is 77 amps just for the 60hp motor. I am very concerned about the service capacity of the building and am not sure of what the rules of power distribution are for a building like this! Can we just keep adding sub panels to our existing service? It appears as though the electricians that installed our HVAC equipment may have already cheated the panel. The Main panel breaker bus is setup so that larger breakers cannot be directly accross from smaller breakers, I assume so that the bus does not get overloaded. It appears as though they may have ground the tabs off of some of the larger breakers to make them fit opposing each other. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!!!
Thanks in advance...
Thanks in advance...