Electrify Everything on a 100-Amp Panel?
- ellen1777
- Sep 22
- 1 min read
YES YOU CAN!
by Angela Kantola
Homeowners who want to get off fossil fuels and fully electrify their homes may think they can’t electrify an older home without a costly electric panel upgrade. In truth, most often a 100-amp panel (fairly common in homes built before the 2000s) is fully adequate to allow home electrification. Why? Because we don’t often use every load in our house at the same time. After analyzing hourly utility data across hundreds of thousands of single-family California homes, Peninsula Clean Energy found that 99% of all-electric, single-family homes never use more than 100 amps of power.
Shawn LeMons of Broomfield, Colorado, agrees. Last year, his home was featured on one of the one-home, once-a-month tours cosponsored by Go Electric Colorado and New Energy Colorado. Shawn’s 1993 production home is almost all electric and runs safely and code-compliant on a 100A panel. No expensive panel upgrade was needed. Shawn has a 3.5 kW rooftop solar PV system (covers about 30% of annual electric use), Tesla Model Y driven ~20,000 miles/year, Energy Star appliances and lighting, low-E windows plus cellular shades, and more. With typical efficiency upgrades, this home has become a case study in attainable mainstream home energy performance. It has near-zero impact on the grid in the summer, and uses no gas heat in the winter. The Level 2 EV charger shares a 30A breaker with an electric dryer on a smart switch, allowing convenient operation of either one.
You can learn more about electrifying your home without an expensive panel upgrade in these helpful references:
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