Like with many things, I know a little, but not a lot when it comes to wiring. I know enough practical stuff from assisting an electrician as a kid, reading tons of books, and learning enough electrical code compliance to have wired three houses and one office all the way from the meter base onward, however, I have a situation I’m not sure of a solution for.
The building is the house I grew up in which is next-door to our house now and it is not been occupied for 10 or 15 years. We left the electricity on because we do have freezers of food in there but other outdoor lighting and stuff comes from the source.
Mice got into a breaker box, and build a nest right on top of the main breaker. Overtime I suspect the mouse pee was what caused the corrosion I’ll post a picture of.
I got it all cleaned out, and the insulation everywhere is intact. All the mouse nest and poop is cleaned out, but there is lots of rust on the cabinet. And the breakers are cruddy looking at least in the outside.
In all of the cases where I have done wiring and replaced an old breaker box with a new one the main breaker and box were bought together with the main breaker, already mounted to the bus.
I have no reason to think the breakers aren’t in working order other than suspicion, and I can certainly take a couple of the individual 20 amp breakers out and crack them apart to see what the innards look like. A couple of times during the remodeling we are doing we have managed to trip breakers by plugging and things like an air compressor and other large tools into the same outlet that was only low amperage, so at least some of the breakers work and I could test the individual circuit ones or just spend the money and replace them all if need be.
What I don’t know is how to safely test a 200 amp breaker… it is one thing to short a black to white with a screwdriver to test a 10 or 20 amp breaker, but not sure I’d want to be in the same room with such a method for a 200 amp one…
and realistically, I would be more comfortable replacing it, even if it tested OK at the moment.Plus, it just looks bad, and the other question is, can it be replaced without replacing the metal circuit breaker box that everything is in. As you can see, with my OCD, almost all of the circuits exit in conduit, so it would be a nightmare to have to physically remove the metal box and then try to find one that would be similar to this 20 year old box, much less thread all those wires back.
Whatever I do is going to require power shut off outside for a while by the electric company, and we do have two freezer loads of food, so for both of those reasons, whatever I do that requires the main power be off I’d like to do fairly quickly.
I can see that all of the wires, although looking cruddy, have their insulation intact. So my thought is to turn off all of the breakers label all of the wire pairs and remove all of the individual circuit breakers then see what the bottom part of the exposed breaker bus looks like. If it looks OK then hook the freezer breakers back up until I can get the power company to turn the power off for a day (then back on within freezer-thawing time). While the outside power is off I can take the main breaker off and see what stuff looks like under it, HOPEFULLY just replacing the breaker - if that’s even possible.
I can certainly take a wire brush and air compressor to the inside of the cabinet at that point to get the rest of the crud out and as much rust as possible. I suppose I could also safely paint it with some kind of primer approved for electric cabinets.
If the breaker bus appears to be in decent shape and I can replace the main breaker, then the rest seems to be easy and it’s just a matter of how many of the other breakers and/orI want to replace how much money I want to spend on them.
If the breaker bus sucks, or if there’s some reason I just can’t replace the main breaker, then my only other thought would be if I could put in another main breaker box that is new, wire everything up and then connect those new breakers in the new box (via however many pieces of conduit it would take for code purposes) to the old box and just use the old box as a large splicing box.
Doing the latter, without some major tearing into the walls would be difficult, but if I had to, I could route to the old box via the front panel cover by just putting conduit holes on it. I’d have to look up the wire density requirements, but I imagine it would only take a few pieces of conduit to house, all of the household circuits, coming from the actual (new) breaker box to the old splicing box if they were 2 inch or so.
Obviously, I certainly hope I can salvage the box in the breaker box and just replace the main breaker.
One electrician I talked to, said that the only way to do it would be to take a Sawzall to all the conduit and pull the box and replace it, then pull all of the individual circuit wires from the nearest destination and replace them, unless there were enough slack, somehow to get them back into the new box with a long enough section for a splice. That seems like an incredible amount of work…. I think he was hoping I’d give up and just pay him to do all that..
