35 year old house with original Federal Pacific panels. Looking to upgrade both external and internal units. South Florida location. What should I expect to pay?
He said he had Federal Pacific panels, that's enough reason to change them out.Price certainly will depend on how extensive the work is. IF you are merely replacing the breaker panel with one of the same amps capacity, that's a modest job. But I would wonder why do that at all?
More likely you want to upgrade to a panel with a higher amps capacity because you want to add more circuits and load, and so you ALSO want the power service into your house to be higher capacity. For example, we did that two years ago. Went from a 100 Amp panel to a 200 Amp service so we could add central air to a new furnace and add a buried 100 Amp feed cable out to a new garage. Actual supply and installation of that new buried cable was done and paid under a separate contract.This meant a new larger breaker panel in the house PLUS replacing the large-diameter conduit Mast up the outside of the house, the meter base in that conduit run, and of course new heavier wires inside that Mast. It also involved having the electrical utility disconnecting the old feed cable from the transformer pole and re-connecting with new cable. That's much more complex. As pete6032 said, get at least three estimates. Be sure to ask whether that includes any costs for the work by your electrical utility company, AND fees for inspection / approval by your local electrical regulator agency.
IF you want the contractor to ADD new circuits in your house from the new panel, that is more work and cost, of course.
That seems like a lot of labor. Panels themselves iirc are somewhere between $100-200/ea and then breakers depends on the amps needed. You should be able to price check what's on the quote.$2160
That seems like a good deal for 2 panels. A panel bundle with breakers comes up to around $750 with tax here and then you may need to buy more breakers as well.
Ex:
Been meaning to change out my main one at some point too since I want to run a bigger feed to garage and to server room and my current one is maxed out as far as knockouts and physical space inside goes, to run such large cables. I might do it myself, but at 2k, I would probably hire it to save me the trouble.
If you just need more slots, you might just add a sub-panel fed from a larger breaker in the main box (move a few circuits to the sub-panel if you need to - easier to do this if you have room to place the sub-panel next to the main panel).
^ Of course, that means the service entrance cable and meter and conduit mast must also be for the 200 A rating, so that has to be included in cost. I expect ANY competent electrical contractor would do this all properly. I agree the cost difference between these two options is likely small.
A SMALL hint here that would impact only the costs of the wires inside the outside vertical mast and meter base. (This had a large impact on my 130 ft 100 Amp buried cable to my garage.) For the same AMP capacity (not same wire gauge), Aluminum wire is MUCH cheaper than Copper wire.