General Discussion

My old house needed a repair to the main breaker panel, which is ancient.
The power company checked it out and said it was a problem with some type of contact internal to the panel. They said “this one is really old, and hard to find parts — so i suggest you find someone who is old school, because they’ll have parts, and some of the companies are going to tell you you need to replace the whole breaker panel”.

So i looked for ‘old school’, recognized a local company still in business 35 years after my dad was using them. Two people came out the next morning, brought the part, shut the power off including climbing on the roof, fixed it, turned it back on, and charged me a reasonable fee of around $400. I wrote them a check so that they didn’t have to pay credit card fees.

One guy was an old fellow with 40+ years of experience; while the one who climbed on the roof and did the closeup had just a couple of years, a tattooed young woman with an edgy disposition and punk/grunge style. They got along quite smoothly and were professional. Very good experience.

‘Old school’ can mean a lot of things, but the contrast to what the big-deal corporate companies would have done could not have been more clear.