Top Reasons To Consider Upgrading Your Electrical Box

A circuit breaker panel is the heart of your home's electrical system. You might have an old, bad, or damaged heart, but it's the heart nonetheless. We tend to think of this box — also called a load center, service panel, breaker box, and the like — as immutable characteristics of a house, like the foundation or that weird sunken zone of the living room, but everything can be changed. And, sometimes, changing your breaker panel is a really good idea. The reasons can range from basic safety to future-proofing, and while your initial reasons for upgrading might be simple, you could find that there are other exciting possibilities you didn't even think about. It can be expensive to replace a circuit breaker box, but it can be totally worth it.

For starters, your home's heart can be the brain of your electrical system, too. A smart service panel like the $3,500 Span Panel can open a world of information and functionality to you, giving you detailed insights about your power usage and even offering complete remote control from home or away. It can also ready your home for smart EV charging, solar power, battery backup, and more. But even keeping your existing box and replacing the breakers with more capable models (and maybe more of them) can be an important step up. Breakers can add surge, GFCI, and AFCI protection capabilities that make a home's electrical system substantially safer, all without altering the path of a single wire.

Fault- and arc-sensing technologies are great technologies for insulating you from sketchy wiring, misbehaving appliances, nesting rodents, and a thousand other things. But there are some signs that these dangers aren't hypothetical future events, but realities knocking on your door today. Frequent breaker tripping, signs of scorching on breaker panel or outlets, a burning smell, melted wiring, hot surfaces near any electrical device, hissing sounds from your breaker box, and flickering or dimming lights can all indicate some serious electrical issues and possibly fire hazards. All of these can be signs of overloading an underpowered circuit breaker box.

Not that safety and savings aren't important, but there are a few cases in which an electrical panel upgrade is a simple necessity. If you're planning a change to your wiring or a substantial construction project like adding a home office or in-law suite, and you know that you can't shoehorn these projects into your existing panel's capacity, an upgrade is probably your only option. It's not uncommon to still find 60-amp breaker panels in older houses, and trying to live a modern, wired life commonly requires a 200-amp panel. Other inescapable reasons include a badly outdated panel or fuse box, or plans to add a generator for power outage readiness or EV charging station. A new panel can also deliver power more accurately and smoothly, protecting the appliances and devices you have connected.