Hi All,
My current breaker panel is a Murray Arrow / Hart.
It has two rows of 8 sockets each plus three that are taken up by the main 100 amp breaker.
All of the positions are filled on the panel, I have even removed the old 240v line to use those two spaces for additional breakers.
I have been thinking of adding a sub panel. The house is wired oddly and I am sure that some circuits are overburdened. I want to rewire portions of the house a little at a time to separate things out a bit more logically and keep any one circuit from being overburdened.
Looking at my current panel it says it can use the doubled up breakers which would give me more circuits without the added panel but there are other issues.
The current panel has two lines coming in going to the A and B bus bars and is wrapped by what appears to be aluminum wire which is fed to a common strip on the inside of the box. I assume this means that the aluminum wire is the nuetral. All the circuits are wired so that the ground and neutral lines tie into the same strip as the aluminum wires from the service coming into the house. The box shows that you can add ground strips on each side of the panel and that the large strip on the right would take the neutral wires.
I have heard that some houses were wired this way with ground and neutral run together at the box. I assume that the original fuse panel was swapped out with the breaker box and they left the wiring as it was. The house was built in 1953, was aluminum used then?
Also, since all of the neutral and ground lines are running to the one strip it is quite full. So even if I were to use dual breakers, finding places to wire them in is difficult.
I am in the process of framing a bathroom in the basement and building a shared wall the serves to section off a portion of the basement as a workshop. I will need to rewire the basement lighting and add a few more outlets as well as the circuits needed for the bathroom and several more outlets for the workshop area that can handle table saws, compressor, etc.
So this is really several questions.
1. Should the circuit panel be rewired to separate ground and neutral? I am not sure what/where the earth ground is.
2. If rewiring the panel to separate neutral and ground is there a problem with some circuits wired separated while others still exist tied together or do I have to do all of them at the same time?
3. If not rewiring to separate neutral and ground, can I add another strip to accommodate the additional circuits?
3. Would I be better off adding the sub panel I was originally planning instead of using the double breakers?
As I begin finishing the basement I want to move a lot of the wires so I can put up a ceiling. Some of the wires really look like they should be replaced anyway so I want to run new romex as I go and route it in a better fashion.
In some cases I may just run long lengths of romex where I need them for future use before putting up the walls and ceiling.