Three New Circuits for Going Electric in Vancouver, WA

People usually go electric one appliance at a time, with a separate service call each time. This household in Vancouver, Washington had all three circuits run in one visit: water heater, EV charger and induction cooktop.

Why doing them together costs less

Each one is a small job on its own. Together they share most of the expensive parts:

• One trip and one panel opening. The cover comes off once.
• One trip into the attic. Two of the three runs went through the attic, and going up there once instead of twice saves the most time.
• One load calculation. Adding three big loads means checking the whole house once instead of three separate times.
• One permit and one inspection instead of three of each.

People don’t expect that last one. Spread it out over three years and you pay for three permits and three inspections too.

Can the service handle it?

Adding a breaker is easy. The real question is whether the service can carry a water heater, a cooktop and a car charger on top of everything else.

Having a main panel and a subpanel helped, and this house had both. Splitting the new loads between them kept either panel from getting overloaded and avoided a service upgrade that a one-panel house might have needed.

If the numbers hadn’t worked, we’d have told them to upgrade the service first. That’s why we look at circuits for electric appliances and panel capacity together.

Induction is the one people miss

A gas cooktop just needs an outlet for the igniter. An induction cooktop needs a circuit good for up to 50 amps.

That’s the biggest electrical change when you switch a kitchen from gas to electric, and people often find out after they’ve ordered the cooktop. The photo under the counter shows it: the gas line’s still there, with the new circuit right next to it, ready for the switch. Our post on 240-volt appliance circuits explains how they’re sized.

The EV charger was the easy one

With the panel already open and the garage right there, the EV charger circuit was the simplest part of the day. The charger went on the garage wall where the car parks, and the circuit came off the panel a few feet away.

Charger installs are cheap when the panel’s close and has room. They get expensive when it doesn’t. That’s why it’s worth doing while we’re already in the panel for something else.

Going electric one appliance at a time in Vancouver? Call 360-828-7143 or get the circuits priced together and skip the extra trips.