Panel & Load Center Upgrades · Tampa, FL
Licensed electrical service across Tampa and the greater Bay area.
Tampa is the one place in our service area where a panel upgrade is regularly not really about the panel. In Seminole Heights, Hyde Park and Ybor City the panel is often the visible end of a system that still has cloth-insulated branch circuits, ungrounded outlets and sometimes a pocket of knob-and-tube behind it. Dropping a modern 200A panel onto that wiring gives you a bigger supply feeding the same old problem. We look at what the panel is actually connected to before we price it, and we will tell you when the wiring, rather than the panel, is where your money should go first.
A 1920s bungalow that has been added to over a century rarely has one clean answer. We map which circuits are original, which were replaced and what the service can actually carry, then sequence the work so you are not paying twice.
In New Tampa and Westchase the wiring is modern and grounded. The constraint is a builder-grade panel with no spare spaces, which is what stops an EV charger, a pool heater or a home office going in cleanly.
Inside Tampa the permit and inspection run through City of Tampa Construction Services. Addresses in unincorporated Hillsborough go to County Development Services instead. Tampa’s boundary is irregular, so we check the parcel rather than the mailing address.
What Tampa homeowners ask about panel & load center upgrades.
Usually the panel and service come first, because the rewire has to land somewhere and doing it twice is the expensive outcome. The exception is when the existing service is adequate and the branch wiring is the actual hazard, in which case spending on a larger panel first buys you nothing. This is exactly the question we answer on site, because it depends on what your house actually has rather than on its age.
Not on its own. Two-prong outlets almost always mean there is no equipment ground running back from those circuits, and that ground path is a property of the branch wiring rather than of the panel. A new panel gives you capacity and modern breakers, and the outlets stay ungrounded until the circuits serving them are addressed or GFCI protection is fitted with the correct labelling.
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