Electrical panel upgrade in Portland, OR

A panel upgrade swaps your old service, and often the service entrance feeding it, for a modern, higher-capacity panel with new breakers and correct grounding brought up to current code. For a Portland house, 200 amps is the usual target. You are a strong candidate if your lights dim when a big appliance starts, if you have run out of breaker slots, if you still have a fuse box, or if you are adding EV charging, a heat pump, or an ADU to a home that was never sized for them.

We don't diagnose from the curb. We open the panel, read the service and the loads you actually run, and tell you plainly whether an upgrade is warranted or whether a smaller fix will do.

A panel upgrade on an older Portland home is rarely just the panel. Across the inner east side, in Buckman, Sunnyside, and Woodstock, many houses still take their power from an overhead service drop to a weatherhead and mast on the roofline, and if that mast, the meter base, or the service-entrance conductors are as old as the panel itself, they come up as part of the same job. We also bring the grounding electrode system to current code, since a pre-war home may still be leaning on a single old ground point that no longer meets it. None of that is upsell; it is what a service change on a century-old house actually involves.

Portland is also the one city we serve where your electric utility depends on your address. Most of the city is Portland General Electric, but Pacific Power serves parts of downtown and north and east Portland, so the disconnect and reconnect at the meter gets scheduled with whichever one feeds your block. As your licensed contractor we handle that call with the utility and line the outage up with the city inspection, so your power is down only for the hours the swap takes, not the whole day.