Panel in Panel

[jmellc]

Worked some this week at a friend's restaurant. Lights in basement were not working, basement hadn't been used for years, etc. Someione else had been out & gave up 1st day. He'd removed a switch in basement stairway & cut some wires in switch box. I hunted & pecked, found 1 ckt at a time from a panel you wouldn't think of as feeding basement. Eventually got all ckts hooked up again. What seemingly happened is that over the years, new things needed power & someone went through panel disconnecting all ckts going "other places". Didn't even cap the wires he disconnected. I got power back & replaced a few lights/switches.

The panel had been an OLD Westinghouse. Very old, a similar one in basement was a WH that looked like a Federal Pacific, with breakers in out position for on. Thought FP was only one that did that. But someone removed part of the WH guts, took guts from a Siemens panel & attached to old. They warped it somehow, as breakers don't all fit in well & some spaces not at all. Cover was haphazardly screwed to outer rim of old panel cover. SLOPPY all the way. I fixed up best I could & made it close safely. 1st pnl had been 3 ph, as I saw 4 wires incoming & a capped one was live. The inserted panel is single phase.

I think I can remove the rest of the guts & mount an entire new 100 amp panel inside, using chase nipples to bring wires into panel, then get some metal spacers cut to bridge the gaps on all sides. Can do away with original door that way & not look too bad. New cover & door will be main thing seen. I can disconnect 3rd phase at source & make it into a ground for ground bar.

I am making a drawing this weekend to fax to Inspections for their thoughts. Anyone else done a similar job recently?

 

[ActionDave]

Not recently and I didn't do any of the work but, the city hall in our town had an old Square D panel that was obsolete. Instead of replacing the old panel, the guts were removed and a new panel was mounted over it.

The circuits and feeders are brought into the new panel through chase nipples. The old panel door has a piano hinge down the left side so you can still access the pipes. Crazy, but it works.