Electrical in Redwood City

The most common electrical job in Redwood City is a service that was perfectly adequate in 1955 and is now carrying a kitchen full of appliances, a car, and increasingly a heat pump.

Plenty of homes through Mount Carmel, Palm Park and the older streets are still on 100A panels, and some are on panel types that have documented breaker failure problems and are worth replacing on safety grounds regardless of capacity. We'll tell you if that's what you have. We'll also tell you when you don't need an upgrade — which is more often than people expect. If the house still has gas cooking, heat and drying, there's usually headroom, and a reduced EV charge rate or a load-management device can solve many of the remaining cases for a fraction of the cost of a service change.

That decision comes from a load calculation, not from the number stamped on the panel door. Two identical 100A services give opposite answers depending on what else is connected. Anyone quoting you a panel upgrade without running one is guessing, and you're paying for the guess.

Where an upgrade is genuinely needed we pull the permit, do the work, and coordinate the PG&E meter swap and the inspection so those line up — that sequencing is where these jobs usually stall for weeks. One piece of advice that saves real money in this city: if you expect to add an EV charger, a heat-pump water heater and eventually a heat pump for heating, have the load calculation done once for that end state. Solving each appliance as it arrives is how homeowners end up paying for electrical work three separate times.