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Doug,
Welcome to the wonderful world of the split panel box...
Usually these are arranged so that the mains connects to one set of bars
(usually the larger 220V stuff is attached here), with one breaker from this
group supplying the "light duty" stuff - gotta love it...
I've done a fair amount of work on my main panel with it hot (100A subpanel
in the garage, and a 30A generator sub panel) - and its a little creepy
(especially when
you gotta punch holes in the box with a holesaw =8-0 ) but can be done
if you're
REALLY careful. The bad part is that it sounds like maybe you don't have
"snap in" breakers? That could be a problem, as the idea of jabbing a
busbar with a screwdriver to
get a breaker free is creepy (the wire side isn't bad as you can just
turn the breaker off...) - but then again,
if you aren't replacing one of the big "main" breakers, you can just
shut off the power to the secondary
part of the panel and have at it...
Hopefully the guys that wired your house were neater than the guys that
did mine (the panel was a
mess - looked like a mass of spaghetti - I thought that was just the way
it was done until
I saw some panels being put together by commercial guys who cared....).
An alternative is to pull the meter (not hard to do, but the electric
company gets REALLY upset when they see those little tags cut + I think
you're supposed
to have a licensed electrician doing the work(or at least
pulling/replacing the meter) if you inform 'em
about it....) - you might just call them and see what they have to say...
Another alternative would be to just turn that panel into a sub panel
and put a new small main in with a
breaker - but that's not cheap, so...
Good Luck,
rkg
(Richard George)
>
>Hello,
>
>The home I recently bought was built in the 70's and
>is overall pretty well-built (no aluminum wiring,
>etc.). But I noticed that neither the the main
>electrical panel, or the box outside with the meter,
>has a master circuit breaker or any other way of
>cutting off the power to everything at once.
>
>In this type of system, how is it possible to safely
>work inside the box, for example to replace a
>defective breaker? It is necessary to remove the
>electrical meter itself to shut off the power? Can
>this even be done without getting the electric company
>involved?
>
>BTW, the main panel is an ITE Pushmatic model where
>the breakers are screwed to the bus bars and can't
>simply be unplugged from a live box like modern ones.
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>Doug Braun
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