200-Amp Service Relocation and Panel Replacement in Ridgefield, WA

Most panel upgrades stay where the old panel was. This one moved. On a pre-1980 home in Ridgefield, Washington, the overhead service came in at the wrong corner, the old 100-amp panel in the basement was full, and the homeowner wanted a 50-amp circuit for an RV. We took down the old service, put a new 200-amp meter main on the southwest corner, and rebuilt the panel from there.

Why we moved the service

Moving a service is more work than swapping a panel in place, but it’s worth it when the old spot works against the house. Moving it to the southwest corner did three things:

• Put the meter main where the power line wants to come in, on a clean stretch of siding with a straight shot up the mast
• Shortened the run to the basement panel, so the service wires aren’t snaking through the house
• Got the equipment out of the way of the stone skirting and the new landscaping

The mast is bonded and supported to WAC and NEC rules, and the ground wire runs straight down to the ground rod at the base of the wall. Washington adopted the 2023 NEC in April 2024, so a service change like this gets inspected to current code, not the code the house was built under.

The red label on the meter main

The EMERGENCY DISCONNECT / SERVICE DISCONNECT label is there because NEC 230.85 requires an outdoor emergency shutoff on a house when the service gets replaced. It lets the fire department shut off power to the whole house from outside.

That surprises a lot of homeowners when they upgrade their panel in Washington today. If your old service was a plain meter with the shutoff only inside, the new one won’t look like what came off the wall. It’s also part of the price, which we break down in our guide to what a 200-amp service upgrade costs.

Re-landing every circuit from a pre-1980 panel

You could tell a lot from the old panel before we opened it: set into the wall, covered in white overspray from an old paint job, breakers jammed in tight, and a worn-out neutral bar.

Moving that many old circuits into a new 200-amp panel means dealing with whatever’s in the walls of a house this age. Here that included aluminum branch wiring, which changes how we make the connections. It’s worth knowing about even if you never do a full aluminum wiring replacement. We labeled and landed every circuit in the new panel. Nothing was left live in the old one.

We added two kinds of protection the old panel never had:

1. Surge protection at the panel, so the whole house is covered by one device instead of a bunch of power strips. Our page on whole-house surge protection covers what it does and doesn’t do.
2. AFCI and GFCI protection where code requires it. NEC 210.12 requires AFCI on 15- and 20-amp living-space circuits once they’re changed. The two do different jobs, which we explain in how AFCI and GFCI protection differ.

The RV circuit

Last, we ran a dedicated 50-amp circuit to the southeast corner for the homeowner’s RV. A service upgrade is the cheapest time to do it. The panel’s open, there’s room to spare at 200 amps, and nobody has to come back and find space later. Same goes for any dedicated circuit while the panel’s apart, whether it’s an RV, a shop or a hot tub.

Got a rural property near Ridgefield with a full panel and a service in an awkward spot? Call 360-828-7143 or get your service scoped, and we’ll tell you what the upgrade involves.