Electrical panel upgrades for New York apartments and houses

The panel is where everything you plug in meets the service the building gives you. When both date from the 1960s and the apartment now runs an induction range, a heat pump and two window units, breakers trip and lights sag. The fix is a load calculation first, then a panel sized to the load.

In a house the upgrade is mostly ours to do. In a co-op or condo it's a three-way job: you, the building, and sometimes Con Edison, because a bigger panel is useless if the riser feeding it is undersized. We check the riser and the meter before quoting, so the number you get is for the whole path.

We install Square D and Eaton panels and hand you a labeled directory and the inspection sign-off.

Going from 100 to 200 amps means a new panel, a new main breaker, and often a larger service conductor from the meter. In a one- or two-family house the conductor run is short and the job is usually a day. In an apartment building the feeder from the meter room can be long and shared, so we check its size before promising 200 amps; sometimes the honest answer is 150. The permit is filed in DOB NOW, Con Edison is scheduled if the service has to be pulled, and inspection follows.

A load calculation adds up what the space actually draws: lighting and general receptacles by square footage, the kitchen circuits, fixed appliances, HVAC, and any charger or heat pump you're planning. The number tells you whether the existing service can carry the new load or whether the panel is only half the answer. Co-op and condo boards ask for this as a load letter before they approve an alteration, and we prepare it as part of the estimate rather than as a separate visit.

Panels in closets, bathrooms and behind refrigerators fail code and inspection. Moving one means extending every branch circuit to the new location, which in plaster-and-lath walls is careful work. We plan the route with the fewest openings, use armored cable throughout, patch as we go, and rebuild the wall only where we had to open it. Relocation adds labor to a straightforward upgrade, so we'll tell you when the existing spot can stay and when the inspector won't sign off on it.

Federal Pacific Stab-Lok and Zinsco panels have a documented history of breakers that fail to trip under fault. If your panel carries either name, replacement is the recommendation regardless of how it's behaving today. The swap is a like-for-like amperage change with new breakers, new bus and new grounding, and it's a good moment to add AFCI and GFCI protection where the 2025 code now requires it. Insurers and co-op boards increasingly ask for this before approving renovations, and the panel label tells you which brand you have.