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 Question(s) about installing circuit breakers in load center 
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I have an Eaton CH load center that was installed by a professional electrician a few years ago. At the time, I had an ancient 100 amp panel with very few circuits that was probably the panel that was installed when the house was built in the 50s. The new panel is a 200 amp service. The electrician who installed the panel installed breakers for all the existing circuits, adding AFCI breakers where required by code. The old circuits feed multiple rooms, and are pretty nonsensical in terms of how things are divided up (basement and upstairs bedroom on same circuit, for example).

I am planning to re-wire the house myself now, and my thought was it would be easiest for me to start adding breakers for the new circuits at the bottom of the panel, which is currently empty. Is there anything wrong with doing it this way? I could not find anything in code that said you have to fill a panel from the top down, bottom up, etc.


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Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:09 am
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Lots of Sparklers on this forum:

https://www.diychatroom.com/

They might already have a thread covering that, too.

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Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:27 am
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You can put breakers where ever you want vertically, but you want to try to keep the total loads (amps) on each side of the panel balanced or equal, as much as possible. So assuming it was balanced to start with, if you add a circuit to one side, you'll want to try to put the next added circuit on the other.

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Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:14 pm
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Traut wrote:
You can put breakers where ever you want vertically, but you want to try to keep the total loads (amps) on each side of the panel balanced or equal, as much as possible. So assuming it was balanced to start with, if you add a circuit to one side, you'll want to try to put the next added circuit on the other.

This


Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:40 pm
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Traut wrote:
You can put breakers where ever you want vertically, but you want to try to keep the total loads (amps) on each side of the panel balanced or equal, as much as possible. So assuming it was balanced to start with, if you add a circuit to one side, you'll want to try to put the next added circuit on the other.

Every other slot is the opposite leg, example 208/220/240 breakers grab 2 consecutive vertical slots, so unless you used every other slot on one side and somehow used every other slot on the other side that was on the same leg it would be hard to get very un-balanced. If you look at a photo of a service you will see the stagger up-down and left-right.


Sun Nov 20, 2022 2:35 pm
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Check the panel cover

Might be a pain to knock out the slots from the bottom up

That’s all I can think of right now

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Sun Nov 20, 2022 7:13 pm
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Albroswift wrote:
Traut wrote:
You can put breakers where ever you want vertically, but you want to try to keep the total loads (amps) on each side of the panel balanced or equal, as much as possible. So assuming it was balanced to start with, if you add a circuit to one side, you'll want to try to put the next added circuit on the other.

Every other slot is the opposite leg, example 208/220/240 breakers grab 2 consecutive vertical slots, so unless you used every other slot on one side and somehow used every other slot on the other side that was on the same leg it would be hard to get very un-balanced. If you look at a photo of a service you will see the stagger up-down and left-right.
This is true. My choice of words was poor. When I said "side" I should have said and meant leg or opposite phase. Good call. :bow:

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Mon Nov 21, 2022 1:17 pm
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