The upgrade file
Electrical Service Upgrades
Most homes only need a repair. When the whole house is genuinely short on capacity, Bretco has completed hundreds of service upgrades across Winston-Salem.
Chapter 01
When it's a repair, and when it's genuinely an upgrade
A service upgrade is a bigger job than most electrical calls, and it is not always the right one. If a single breaker keeps tripping, that is usually a branch-circuit problem, a much smaller repair confined to one circuit. A service upgrade is the right call when the whole panel is out of capacity for what the house is actually asking it to carry, not when one circuit is misbehaving.
Bretco explains which one a house actually has before any work starts, and before any money is spent on the bigger job if the smaller one will do.
A clean electrical panel interior with breakers and conductors neatly dressed.
The move to 200 amp service
Most upgrades Bretco performs move a home up to 200 amp service. The triggers are consistent: adding central air conditioning or electric heat, a home addition that puts more rooms and more load on the same old panel, installing a pool or a spa, or replacing an old fuse panel that was never built for how the house is used now.
Any one of those is usually enough on its own to make an upgrade worth doing properly rather than working around the old panel's limits.
Chapter 03
What upgrade day actually looks like
Plan on roughly six hours without power while the new service goes in. It is also common for some old, overprotected circuits to retrip once they are sitting behind correctly sized breakers for the first time, which is the new panel doing its job and catching something the old one had been hiding.
Bretco would rather a homeowner hear both of those up front than be surprised by them on the day.
Hundreds of upgrades across the Winston-Salem area
This is not a job Bretco does occasionally. The company has completed hundreds of service upgrades across Winston-Salem and the surrounding towns, which is the reason the timeline, the retripping, and the honest repair-versus-upgrade answer are things Bretco can tell a homeowner in advance instead of discovering with them.
Bretco Electric: honest answers on repair versus upgrade, and hundreds of service upgrades completed across Winston-Salem. Call (336) 774-1223.