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Tucson fixer upper electrical update

April 24th, 2007 by Kenric

This is like a long soap opera that never ends.  When we last left the Tucson fixer upper the electric meter had to be moved because it was located under a carport.  Our electrician asked if we wanted to upgrade the house from 100amp service to 200amp service.  It would cost us $100 more because he was buying a new meter box anyway, so all he had to do was buy a 200amp one instead.

So begins the meter box saga.  Since we have both learned from past experience, the first thing he did was to call TEP to find out exactly what they wanted.  TEP has a list of approved meter boxes on their website.  Our electrician went to Home Depot and a bunch of electrical wholesale suppliers in Tucson and could not find a meter box on the list.  The electrical wholesalers say that they’ve been selling these and nobody has returned them or told them that they aren’t being approved.  This led to a call to a TEP supervisor stating that we couldn’t find any approved meter boxes in the city of Tucson.

Apparently, TEP was aware of this issue because they are preparing a new list of approved meter boxes that the suppliers actually have.  But that list be able for a week.  I find it hard to believe that nobody in the city of Tucson is going to be installing meter boxes for a week.  But this came from the guy who’s going to be approving our meter box so even if he’s wrong, I’m sure he’s going to check the meter box model number against the list during our inspection.

So the question was, do we risk installing a meter box (that everyone else is installing but not on the list) and hope that it passes? or do we wait (and lose another week) for the new list to purchase a meter box?

We decided to wait.

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