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SAN MARTIN — Host, Sarah Rutan: If you live in an older home, your electric panel is probably outdated. Worse still, it may represent a safety hazard. Today we’re in San Martin with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Henry Acosta of California Power and Light to learn more.
Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Henry Acosta: So, we recommend if your home was built before the 80s, before the 70s – . So, if you have a home 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, a lot of times the panels that were installed in these times were Zinscos, Federal Pacific. And then the newer ones in the 70s, 80s were Challenger. These particular panels are definitely something to be concerned about. You should have a technician look at them. If you do have any of these panels, we recommend to upgrade them.
The reason being is some of these panels, the breakers don’t detect when you’re having an issue in your home. When you’re wiring, let’s say, an overload or a short circuit. If these breakers don’t detect a problem, what can happen is your wires can overheat and that can lead to a fire. So, we definitely recommend if you have an older home, or sometimes even a newer home, if you smell any burning, or if you continuously trip a breaker, we recommend for you to have us come out and take a look at it, evaluate the panel.
And if you have one of these panels, we’re definitely going to recommend for you to upgrade. When we upgrade, we use Square D. That’s usually the best brand out there. And these Square D brands will detect your problems and could definitely be helpful to not having a fire in your house.
Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.