Electrical Service Upgrade

by J Scott on September 9, 2014

I got a late start on contacting our local electric company (Baltimore Gas & Electric) about getting new electric service to the house. Turns out it’s a pretty involved process around here, and can take a couple months. Luckily, they were able to get the preliminary inspections and design for the new poles/wiring done pretty quickly, but it turns out that they’re going to need a new transformer on the pole closest to the house (we’ll be using a lot more electricity than the previous house was spec’ed for), and that will take some time to order and get installed.

The process is as follows:

  1. Get county inspection for the new breaker box and main service line coming from the box to the exterior of the house.
  2. Submit a request to BG&E for the service with all the information about power usage and electrical devices in the house.
  3. BG&E will come out, do a site inspection and put together a design for the new poles/transformers/wiring.
  4. I’ll approve the design and submit payment for the work.
  5. Since the new lines will run underground, I’ll need to install a conduit (PVC pipe) underground from the power pole to the house — BG&E will run the lines underground through this conduit.
  6. Have BG&E come out and do the work, including installing the underground lines.

We’ve already completed steps #1-4 over the past two months. At this point, we need to get the conduit installed (I’m working on finding a utility contractor to do that work) and then schedule BG&E to come out to do the work. I’m hoping it can be done in the next 4 weeks.

The cost to BG&E is $684.60 (not too bad!) and I’m hoping to get the conduit installed for a few hundred dollars, though I don’t have any specific bids for that yet.

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