Adding some outlets and a new breaker box

Agree with everyone, especially Jim18655 above. Notice that the discussion doesn’t have consistent use of terminology. Worrisome. Not saying you can’t do it, but you are clearly more comfortable running circuits than subpanels.

When I started buying machines, I had an electrician put in the subpanel to the shop area. He helped me size the subpanel for my intended uses, installed it, and then showed me how to size the breakers for specific circuits. I believe it was worth the expense.

Coming after your work to “check” it, I can see potential for trouble. What do you do if you sized the wire wrong or used aluminum instead of copper or whatever or bought a subpanel that you can’t get circuits for or ?

Your shop,but I’d suggest the consultation take place before instead of after. Just my $0.002
 
Another consideration would be if you have or plan on installing a generator.
Depending on what you want to power from a generator could affect how you decide to go.
Things like where the breaker box is located vs where generator would be installed, new breaker box vs sub-panel, etc.
After an extended winter power outage, I had a standby generator installed some 10+ years after house was built. If I had it to do all over again, I'd have done the wiring a whole lot different.
 
We have good access under the house ranging from around 7 foot (minus all the head knockers, pipes, rafters and what not) which is what we use as a basement, down to hands and knees crawl space. Only a small section is crawl on your belly and we aren't adding anything over there, so actually running the wires won't be too bad.

The existing panel is maxed out short of swapping out the singles to duplex type breakers. That is how they fixed the issue they found last time where one of the prior owners had run two circuits off one breaker. While we are only looking at adding 6 or 7 new lines, we are planning on something larger than the minimum sized box for our current plans. Probably like a 20 breaker panel to leave plenty of room for the future. The difference between a 10 and a 20 is not that much and we will have the installation cost regardless, so a few more pennies now to avoid paying more later. It is doubtful with the way things are going we will ever lament having too many outlets available.

One of the really positive features of the house is it was used as an office for about 30 years, so they upgraded a lot of the utilities. As a place of work they were also very good about following code. We even have some grounded or shielded circuits they put in specifically for the computers, and phone lines.... and do we have phone lines. The house actually came with a couple boxes of those old office phones with the switchboard buttons, we got some paper towel dispensers and butt gasket holders in the deal too.

We are also right in the city, so I'm thinking available power won't be an issue, the electrical all looks like it was upgraded at some point after the prior owners bought the place in the 1980s.
Everything in the shop is 115v 20A or less. I could see that potentially being an issue if it was some of you guys with 220v and 440v 3 phase equipment, but the spiffy new blender I got for Christmas probably draws more juice than my Sherline lathe.

No plans for a generator. We have lived in areas where the power was out several times a year and sometimes extended periods. We went 2 weeks without power at one point. Here we are inside the city limits, power outages have been rare and very short lived.


After all this We will definitely be consulting with an electrician before starting the work. We are just in the early planning stages at this point, and this has been very good info. Not dissuaded at all from doing the work myself, but confirms my suspicions that adding a panel is a bit of a job and worth consulting with a professional.

Thanks
 
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