Terry Beck
07-25-2007, 08:52 PM
My brain is tired and muddy, help clarify my thinking. Inspected a house today that from what I can gather began life as a house, and a detached garage. One set of service feeders go from a single 100-amp main disconnect breaker at an exterior panel at the meter on the power pole, but are then spliced out at the top of the pole to become two different service feeders going to two seperate mast heads, and then down to two different main panels, one in the house and one in what was originally a detached garage structure.
Since that time, someone has poured a concrete pathway, then a breezeway, and then sometime in recent years has enclosed the breezeway, so it is now one building. I can see very little of the plumbing and electrical, but what I can see leads me to believe that galvanized and copper supply pipes from the well, water heater, and hot water boiler are now connecting the two originally seperate buidings, probably through a slab. Of coure in the meantime, no one has bothered to have the electrical system remodeled. My assumption is that at that time, they SHOULD have re-routed all service feeds to one panel, and re-wire the garage panel as a sub-panel. Correct? (but of course that would cost money). The picture is the panel in the garage part of the structure. There are several other obvious problems at this panel (no code police for one), but my question is more about what are the functional dangers in having two service feeds to the same building?
Since that time, someone has poured a concrete pathway, then a breezeway, and then sometime in recent years has enclosed the breezeway, so it is now one building. I can see very little of the plumbing and electrical, but what I can see leads me to believe that galvanized and copper supply pipes from the well, water heater, and hot water boiler are now connecting the two originally seperate buidings, probably through a slab. Of coure in the meantime, no one has bothered to have the electrical system remodeled. My assumption is that at that time, they SHOULD have re-routed all service feeds to one panel, and re-wire the garage panel as a sub-panel. Correct? (but of course that would cost money). The picture is the panel in the garage part of the structure. There are several other obvious problems at this panel (no code police for one), but my question is more about what are the functional dangers in having two service feeds to the same building?