KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Audio Showings - What To Know About Double Tapped Breakers

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

And welcome to the nerdy agent podcast audio showing of the week. Audio showings where we do audio things and talk about houses. This week, we are going to talk about double lugging on the electrical panel. Something that comes up on inspection reports quite often, something that I think that agents should understand to at least be able to explain to your buyer when they look at the report and go, what is double lugging and what can we do about it? Lugging is such a good word. To start, what is double lugging? Well, you could call it double tapped too, Luke. Sure.

But lugging is more fun. Double lugging or double tapped breakers is when there are two hots going into one breaker. Breakers aren't supposed to have two hots going into them. So it's not good, Luke. You're saying they could break? So essentially what can happen when you have two hots going in, you can have too much power running to one breaker at one time? It can cause that breaker then to trip more often than not. Well, I think too, it's the bigger issue.

And an electrician may correct me. And obviously, consult an electrician when you have electrical problems. is that that contact is only made for one wire to go into it. Oftentimes I've seen Paul say, this is really silly. I could have just tied these two hots together into one hot and then stuck it into the breaker and it would solve the problem. Now you're right.

If you're running, let's say, two areas that both need 15 amp service and you're putting them both on one 15 amp breaker, that can become an issue. Typically the solution for these sorts of things isn't what I just said, which is to just tail them together. it would be to put in a subpanel and actually separate those hots.

Or sometimes if there's an extra breaker spot, you just add a new breaker. Yeah, if you see double tapping with extra breaker spots opening, then there's probably more electrical problems you're going to be concerned with because that just means that the person who did, it's an idiot. But you are right, yes. And most of the time when you see it, and I think Josh had this at his house when he bought it is. So many double-tenth circuit. The panel was completely full.

And I think six of them were double-tapsed. Six of them? It was so many. Did you add a subpanel? Yeah, so we did. You needed it for your, for it. He needed a sub panel so he could charge his Tesla. Yeah, charge the car.

But we added the sub and then when we were adding the sub, Paul's our electrician. He would call him electric, Paul. He's the best. He was like, how many spots do you want like six to like get rid of these? I was like, give me all of the spots. As many as you can get me. And now we're doing an addition. He's like, that was pretty smart to get all those extra spots.

It's like, you're right, Paul. Isn't it so satisfying, though, to look at a, 200 amp electrical panel that has like 10 out of 30 slots filled. That's how mine looks right now. It's so awesome. It's how my, my sub panel looks kind of like that. So much room for activity. The funny thing though is it's like you know you're getting old and you're probably in real estate. When you come home and Paul finishes putting the subpanel in, I look and I, Chris was like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm just admiring that beautiful subpanel. Like I've been,

I'm so happy for the rest of the day now. Just like, uh, the power. Before we finish, before we finished, back on track. I, I believe Electric Paul has told me there's a specific type of breaker that can solve double lug as well. For certain styles, I don't know if, I think I have a square, he's done that for me. I have a square day, D or maybe an Eaton. No, I can't remember. Certain panels will allow for a, it's, I want to say it's called like a split breaker

where it has two smaller breakers in the same size that one would have. So then it would give you an extra hot contact to use. And it would actually add a breaker to the same size panel. It's a pretty efficient way, especially on like a listing. if the buyers really want the double lugging fixed and there's no more slots on the panel to just say, yeah, we'll make it so there's no more double logging and then you put one of these split breakers in.

There you go. Paul did that for me. Yeah, I think the thing that, I mean, we're getting kind of into like the weeds of one thing about a breaker, but I think it's important when you are doing a showing, you open the breaker. You look at it, you say, hey, there are three double taps here.

You can't see it unless you open up the entire panel. That's dangerous, Josh. True. But you can see when there's, you can see there's two slots in the. the in the one, you can see when there's two spots in the one. You could see if it was a split breaker. Yeah.

You could see that. You don't want everything split, right? So you can look at it and be like, okay, so here are the things that might come up here. There's open slots. Here's the amperage of the whole thing, right? Like, you can see some of those things in the front end and just point those out as potential things that will come up to your. The biggest thing that I'll do is if I see that a house has been remodeled when I look

at the electrical panel is I check and see if there's arc fault breakers because it's a requirement for code nowadays. and if there wasn't an arc fault approved like outlet or switch that was solving for arc faults and there was remodeling that was done, then likely there was no electrical permit pulled. So that's one thing that I often will look at. Man, you want to see an even more satisfying panel. Not only are there 200 amp service with 20 extra slots. There's arc faults on the brake.

Yeah, there's $1,200 worth of breakers. It's just a perfect panel. What does it cost to add a subpanel, AJ? It's like four or five hundred bucks most of the time. What does it cost to replace a panel? Depends if it's Paul doing it for us or for somebody else. But $2,500 probably. Yeah, he just redid my whole 200 amp panel with everything's pretty much arc faulted and everything.

The crazy thing is that an arc fault breaker, I believe, is running around $60 to $70 right now. And the same standard breaker with the same rating on it, like a 15 amp versus 15 amp, is like $3, I want to say. So the cost of the arc fault protection is super high. And we could talk about arc fault on a future podcast. But I think it's important to know these things because once again, if you see this, you're like, okay, yeah, this is happening. This is on the inspection report. It's going to be another $600 versus $6,000, right?

So just something to be aware of as you're thinking about pointing this out to a client. And that's all we have this week on the nerdy agent podcast audio showing of the week. Bye-bye. Hope you enjoy.