Have you ever seen this?

I did an inspection yesterday and found something i’m seeing for the first time ever–Two service panels (I think) off of one meter. As far as I can tell there is a feed from the back of the meter into the kitchen service panel, and a feed coming out below the meter to another service panel on the exterior. Is this even legal? What are the issues? Both panels have problems. Somebody give me some verbage for the report. :roll:

Given the bare wire in the conduit body on the right side of the outdoor enclosure I would guess that there is NM cable in that conduit.

I would say that the 50 Amp service is going to a garage and if this is 100 Amps, the NM is to an outside light source and the rest is back fed into the Main panel in the Kitchen.

No this is not okay. There are seven breakers which means a main disconnect must be installed(6 allowed without a main). The panels would then be subs and they would need rewired.

Good point Cameron if indeed this all has to be shut off but my thought is the one that says 50 Amps is not the main. so there is only 6, TBS you still would need to go to two places to shut all the power off which of course is in NO way acceptable.

Not sure I follow. I’m counting the 50 amp as one of the seven branch circuits.

If the 50 Amps goes to the garage and not to the house is it not considered different since it does not fall in the same 6 throw category.

The six throw rules states that they all be grouped at the same location. What exactly are we looking at, something doesn’t make sense.

Agreed!

I’m guess that the missing link is that there may be conductors coming out of the back of the meter enclosure.

Yes, he said that. These are two panels fed from the meter with no main disconnect. I thought the six breaker rule applied to all the electricity going to the house, not just at one panel.

Kevin, I see what you mean about the 50 possibly going to a separate structure. I really don’t know how the six breaker rule would apply to that situation. We need someone to look up the NEC section and post it. This is a good scenario to learn from.

Ditto! We need Paul or the POPE:smiley:

Here’s the NEC wording for the number and grouping of service disconnects:

Thanks for the input fellas. I basically wrote in the report that they need to have an electrician do a complete assessment on the system. To make things more fun, this was a 203K project!

You did good with your report as this service has several issues.

To be honest, I don’t get what’s going on here so I have stayed out.

The OP and pictures don’t give me enough information to give an accurate “guess” as to what’s going on.

If they are both actually part of the service equipment, they would have to be grouped (as previously mentioned) and would still violate the “six throw” rule - also previously mentioned.

With the information given, I think the best possible guesses have already been provided.