The new electrical service is installed and the solar panels hooked up. The meter now “runs backward"!

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We got a couple of good breaks (pun intended?) with the new breaker box. First, remember the power outage that took out the wine refrigerator? Well Edison was not done. They scheduled another outage for some finish up work on the transformer. Good news is that we were able to get the new service upgrade done on the same day. So we had only one day of no power, not two.

The second good news came when Edison came to approve the breaker box location. (Yes, even though there was a previous box there they still needed to be satisfied with the location!) We had thought that the service wires were good for only up to 125 amp service. The planner told us that we could actually go to 200 amps. The box was going to be a 200 amp buss downgraded to 125 amps. That entailed replacing the 200 amp breaker that came with the box with a 125 amp one that cost more than the box and included breaker!

I forgot to take pictures with the panel uncovered. I’ll do that when the inspection happens Tuesday. One reason for the upgrade was so that we could have arc fault interrupter and ground fault isolation breakers to better protect the house.