sfav8r
Senior Member
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area
We have a 6 unit building where the owners (6 unit TIC bldg) want to replace the 6 sub panels and 1 house panel because the existing equipment is FP. These are approximately 600sq ft units with the typical 2 outlets per room for this vintage bldg. Some have dishwasher/disposals. None have laundry circuits, 2 appliance circuits, etc.
The current configuration is overhead feed to a disconnect which feeds a 3-meter gutter and a 4-meter gutter. Each meter drops down to a sub panel.
We recommended that the entire service be changed and upgraded to 300a and we also gave an alternate estimate to replace just the sub panels and leave the existing 175a disconnect. The association opted to do the panels now and build a reserve account to upgrade the service at the end of next year. We had the inspector look at the job prior to starting because of some clearance concerns. At that time he said "you're going to need to upgrade the service." We argued that we were not doing anything to the service and were just changing sub panels since everything we were doing is after the disconnect. He said "if you can't show me load calcs showing that the service is adaquate then you can' change just the sub panels because you are "essentially" changing the service.
So here are my specific questions:
I believe that I am 100% correct that this is NOT a service upgrade in any way as far as the NEC is concerned.
I believe that it would be best to upgrade the service, but that if the client cannot afford to do it all at once it is reasonable to get rid of the FP panels now and upgrade the service later.
I believe that the inspector should NOT require any load calcs for the changing of the panels only. And, if he did want to see calc, it should be only on what is actually installed at this time and not the 2 appliance circuits per unit, laundry, etc, that would be required on a new service.
Any thouoghts?
The current configuration is overhead feed to a disconnect which feeds a 3-meter gutter and a 4-meter gutter. Each meter drops down to a sub panel.
We recommended that the entire service be changed and upgraded to 300a and we also gave an alternate estimate to replace just the sub panels and leave the existing 175a disconnect. The association opted to do the panels now and build a reserve account to upgrade the service at the end of next year. We had the inspector look at the job prior to starting because of some clearance concerns. At that time he said "you're going to need to upgrade the service." We argued that we were not doing anything to the service and were just changing sub panels since everything we were doing is after the disconnect. He said "if you can't show me load calcs showing that the service is adaquate then you can' change just the sub panels because you are "essentially" changing the service.
So here are my specific questions:
I believe that I am 100% correct that this is NOT a service upgrade in any way as far as the NEC is concerned.
I believe that it would be best to upgrade the service, but that if the client cannot afford to do it all at once it is reasonable to get rid of the FP panels now and upgrade the service later.
I believe that the inspector should NOT require any load calcs for the changing of the panels only. And, if he did want to see calc, it should be only on what is actually installed at this time and not the 2 appliance circuits per unit, laundry, etc, that would be required on a new service.
Any thouoghts?