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An old timer at a job site in Toledo told me my panel schedules were garbage, and he was right
About two years back I was running a small tenant buildout in Toledo, maybe 4,000 square feet of office space, and I had been doing my panel schedules the same way for almost a decade. Just a basic spreadsheet with circuit numbers and a short label like "lights" or "plugs" and that was it. Well, this retired electrician who was helping me out on the rough in looked at my panel and said straight up, "Nobody can troubleshoot this in five years, including you." That stung at first because I thought I was organized, but then he walked me through it. He said to list the actual room, the fixture count, and a panel location note on every single circuit, and to do it in pencil on the door card as the job goes so it matches what actually got installed. Cost me maybe an extra hour of paperwork per job, and now when a tenant calls me about a tripped breaker in suite 210, I know exactly what I'm walking into. Anybody else have an old timer hand them a hard truth that actually stuck? I want to know what advice you got that you still use today.
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blakem1327d ago
My buddy Dave ran a 12 unit apartment reno over in Sylvania and his panel labels just said stuff like "kitchen" and "bedroom" with no unit numbers. When a tenant in unit 7 kept losing power to half her outlets, he spent almost two hours flipping breakers and tracing romex before he figured out the circuits were split across two panels. He redid every label with unit and room on it after that, and now his service calls take ten minutes instead of two hours.
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