Hi, this is Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric. I was going to talk to you about arc fault breakers. Our new code is coming up in 2014 & it should be adopted by June of next year by most cities. There is a rumor going on that if we change these panels out, which is called a service change & put on a new meter, which is required when you touch your panel you have to update your meter & put in a slip sleeve if you are underground feed. It is now required & what I am hearing is that we will have to arc fault the breakers. So normally if we extend these circuits around the corner & put the service on the other side because someone wants to move it or put it inside & flip it or lets say we have a house with an old panel down in the landing of a stairway. It has to move according to code or in a kitchen cabinet or in a bathroom, well if you extend all these branch circuits you are modifying article 210.12 under arc fault breakers. They expect you to arc fault every circuit you touch, so I think it is getting to a point that since we are starting to extend inside its own cabinet box, where it originates. They are going to make us start arc faulting these things. My suggestion to you is before they adopt 2014, you should try to get service changes if you are looking at doing it. Typically, it starts at $3,000.00. People ask me all the time, how much is this going to cost? The rule of thumb is that it starts at $3,000.00, but that is assuming that your panel & meter are located next to each other. That is dealing with a permit, Xcel & all their fees or the power provider I should say, as well as brand new panel, breakers, all that you see right here, even your grounding as well has to go here. We put in two ground rods down here in the dirt. Keep in mind, if you aren’t going to do the arc fault breakers and you don’t want to do that, the only way to do that is to avoid a permit. I don’t suggest doing that. I definitely suggest that you do a permit with everything as much as possible because it is good when you sell your home, as well as if you build out a basement, you are going to want the square footage. Permits are there to protect the consumer. We suggest as much as possible, just so you know if we had to come in here & put arc fault breakers on this service, which was about $3,200.00, this would have automatically gone up $600.00 more for the breakers & this case with the breakers, this might have been about a $1,000.00 just for the breakers because we had a lot of 2 pole 20 amps just for the baseboard heaters. If you end up arc faulting the circuits inside & they end up tying together, now you are dealing with time & material to get those separated. In this particular house, we had found some splices in the drywall & some of the circuits were tied together in one box. Stuff like that is impossible to find, so I don’t know how they are going to amend that for the code, if they decide to go this way, other than we come out with testing equipment & find a way to set a sub-panel & new breakers. We could tell you up front, these circuits are going to set but these ones won’t set. Sometimes it is impossible as you can see how it bundles in. Sometimes we can’t figure out what is neutral or hot. It is going to be an open end part of the bid, we can’t tell you what is going to set & what is not. Once we set the breaker & put the neutrals to that breaker, then we will know if it is setting. If it doesn’t then we have to come inside the home, start tracing out that side of the home to figure out how it loops. Thanks for joining us! See you next week.
