Taking questions for tonight's podcast

UWhuskytskeet said:

I'm going to move my service underground (mast is bent in half on the house from before I bought it, and we are re-roofing, so I'm taking the opportunity to run everything underground and pull the mast.)

The 43 year old pan on the house isn't transferable to UG services per the PoCo Engineer that stopped by ( he cited too little fill space for their modern install requirements, and no UG knockouts) and they want it replaced. The price difference wasn't enough to sway me conduit wise, so I went ahead and had approved a 3" run to the house from the pole.

Power company here supplies the underground feed for the service you decide to take. With me having to replace the pan and already having the right size conduit in the ground, I'm tempted to go ahead and have them run a 320 amp service (I'm 100% full on a 40 space panel so I need a sub panel as is).

My question for you: If I don't replace the service feed to the existing panel, reusing it and the existing conduit in wall with no modification to feed into the old panel, will it trip an inspection on the old panel and require it to be brought to current code, or should I only have to worry about passing a current code inspection on the 2nd new panel coming off the new meter pan outside? I'm asking to be honest for the sake of not having to AFCI up the whole house to do all this mess.

I don't believe AFCi upgrade will come into play. But you can only have one meter to a house. The old panel has to be fed off of it. No house should require more than 200 amps though unless you have extraordinary power draws.

Sounds like you have breaker limitations but not amperage issues. I would just go with a 200 amp and upsize the current panel to a larger size. You can run a sub off of it to give more breaker space. They make a 42 and I think even larger panel now.