4 Point Home Inspection: Electrical Panel

hi guys its Neal Surfside home inspections and this is part of our video series to help you pass the four point inspection this is the inspection of their want and from you for your insurance so your insurance bounty insurance companies have got a little bit stiffer about this lately and they want the house be in decent condition not a very in-depth inspection so I wouldn't panic about it too much this is a part of the series of videos that we're doing to help you pass it you can see all of them on our website at home inspections by Neil comm I just go online and search for home inspections daytona beach home inspections for orange will show up there and click on the Surfside home inspections that's us and go to the four point inspection page and you'll see the series of videos there and some written information make it pretty simple for you now this particular video we want to cover the electrical panel something about the electrical panel do not open it up yourself what i'm going to do here either need to be an electrician or you need to be a licensed inspector and have had some training there have been situations where i actually go up to a panel before we even open it and if you touch it it properly is one thing you want to make sure that it's not charged and we have had issues where we touch a screw on there all sudden there's a zap going on and we have to call electrician out there before anybody touches anything again so be careful about the electrical panels they are not to be trifled with first things trying to make this videos educational as possible for you guys give you some information and get you through through this this simple little inspection so i'm going to give you a little information about the electrical panel general condition we are looking at that we're looking at matching breakers i'll explain that in the second empty spaces we're looking for double taps and we're looking for proper grounding in reference general condition when it's not all rusted falling apart that the cover is in place and then the next thing we're looking at is who manufactures it square d i the General Electric there's a host of them out there Siemens the only one that really seems to be a problem for some insurance companies is the Federal Pacific FPE panels and I'll see if you can't get a photo on the website for that for you so you see what those look like they've lost out ul listing as a result of their breakers when they fail they do not trip most the time when these breakers start going bad they trip all the time all the time euros run out the garage just shut them off probably the FFPE breakers is they don't trip when something's overheating and that of course caused fires and issues there so you probably don't want an F P so many insurance companies like citizens they still insure it so if you have that don't worry about it a lot of people with mobile homes will have the federal Pacific's and citizens is insuring it anyway the other thing we want to check is we've got a Square D panel in this case and we want to make sure these breakers are square d also sometimes they'll try and put an ite pant breaker inside a square D panel a vice-versa you loses the ul listing at that point and you have to just have those breakers changed out these breakers generally speaking are not very expensive and easily changed out while your electrician don't do it yourself the other thing we're looking for is empty spaces large empty spaces go sometimes when these breakers will be missing and this piece right here won't be here it'll be an empty hole you can stick your finger in there talking to some adjusters about it insurance adjusters and whatnot and some mention had been made casually about you know people trying to repair something and we're kids in particular sticking their screwdriver there it turns out it's not the kids that are the problem it's the adults kids generally don't mess with this stuff but some adult will go and stick a screwdriver in their thing he's going to fix something and of course the high voltage breaker bars are high voltage ours are back with right behind there so that those need to match these need to have covers the covers easily you can buy them at Home Depot Lowe's they'll have whatever type of you got if you've got a square d go buy a package of the square d blank covers the little plastic covers and they snap right in the holes very simple and then let's see well show you what's on the inside here but I don't want you guys to do this this is something that limits an electrician a lot of liability here all right make the legal claim right here do not do this okay the other thing we're looking for in here is double taps and put the camera in a little bit closer for you so you can see what's going on in here you see each of these breakers you see a wire coming to each breaker now up in here you'll see a bolt looks like a bolt like a little lug in those cases a little screw underneath each of those most brands of panels allow only one wire to go in there Square D actually has a particular type of washer that allows for to and some of the others do also but for the most part you can't you can only have one wire going in there if there's more lure it's called a double tap the elected insurance companies are very specific about this it's on their actual questions in the forms we have to fill out for the four point spec ssin so it's not something you want to shrug off and we just need to get those fixed it's a very easy fix for an electrician to do generally speaking whatever their minimal charge is to come out is pretty much what they're going to charge you and that that's pretty much it get you set up here but they won't charge you much more than the middle mount a guy can fix a double tap in you know 10 or 15 minutes take some more time to drive out to your place and to drive back to his office the cover actually takes more time to take on to put on and take that off and then the other thing that we look for is the grounding one just make sure the panel is properly ground in this case up top here you get three wires would you check the size of those generally they're okay don't have a lot of issues with them being undersized maybe once in the past several years so you got your height remove trolling at ground and then they call talk about browning of the panel it's grounding sometimes they call it bonding and that's this big fat wire right here and they just want to make sure that this electrical panel here is runt and Gert run to ground the box itself so that's about all there is tell you in reference to electrical panels check our other videos help you get through all this remember this one this is the one particular portion that we don't want you to mess with and try to fix yourself if you have questions about it call me go to the website there is a information contact form on there typing send me out your question I'll get back to you quite often I'm in an attic or under a house and I can't come fight no squirrels and bats and things of that nature so I don't I can't reach my phone so send me a message leave me a voicemail I'll get back in touch so enjoy the rest of the videos and don't worry about this four point inspection thing it's really not as bad as people think

Channel: Neil Olshefski

Views: 53,058

Keywords: Inspection, Home Inspection, 4 point inspection, electrical panel inspection

Id: 1KuQu93HaTk

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2015