All Services

A subpanel feeding a garage, shop, or addition sees less attention than the main panel in the house, which means problems tend to sit longer before anyone notices. By the time a subpanel is warm to the touch or buzzing, it’s usually been building toward that for a while.

Signs Your Subpanel Needs a Repair Call

The problems we get called out for most:

• A subpanel cover, breaker, or the enclosure itself that’s warm or hot to the touch
• An audible buzzing or humming coming from inside the subpanel
• Breakers in the subpanel tripping repeatedly, or not resetting cleanly
• Flickering or dimming lights on circuits fed from the subpanel
• Visible scorching, melted insulation, or discoloration around the feeder connection

If a subpanel is hot, buzzing, or shows any scorching, shut off the main disconnect feeding it if you can safely reach it, and call us. Don’t open the subpanel cover yourself to look. That’s not a homeowner task.

Why Do Feeder Lugs Come Loose?

The feeder lugs are where the wire from your main panel connects to the subpanel’s bus, and they’re one of the most common failure points we find. Every connection in an electrical system expands and contracts slightly with heat cycling, and over years of that cycling, a lug that wasn’t torqued to spec in the first place can work its way loose. A loose lug creates resistance at that connection, resistance creates heat, and heat is what you’re feeling when a subpanel runs warm or hear when it buzzes. Re-torquing a lug sounds minor, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that either gets caught early and fixed in ten minutes, or gets ignored until the connection fails outright.

What’s a Bonded Neutral, and Why Does It Matter Here?

At a subpanel, the neutral and ground have to stay on separate buses: only the main panel gets that bond between them. When a subpanel’s neutral and ground are incorrectly bonded together, current that should return only on the neutral conductor can also flow on the ground path, including through the metal enclosure and anything grounded to it. It’s a common mistake in older or DIY subpanel installs, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t always announce itself with an obvious symptom, which is part of why it’s worth having a subpanel checked if you’re not sure how it was originally wired.

Undersized Feeders and Nuisance Tripping

If breakers in your subpanel trip whenever you run more than one piece of equipment at a time, the subpanel itself might be fine and the feeder supplying it might be the actual problem. A feeder sized for a light-duty garage doesn’t have the capacity for a shop that’s since added a welder, a compressor, and a couple of 240V tools. Repeated tripping on the main breaker at the subpanel (not just individual branch breakers) is often this exact pattern, and it’s a load calculation problem more than a single bad breaker. If it’s one specific circuit tripping rather than the whole subpanel, that’s usually a narrower fix: see circuit breaker repair for that side of it.

Sometimes the honest answer is that the original subpanel was never sized for what the space became. A garage wired years ago for a light and a couple of outlets, now running a compressor and shop tools off the same subpanel, may need either a properly sized feeder replacement or a dedicated circuit pulled for the highest-draw equipment so it’s not sharing capacity with everything else.

Repair or Replace: How Do We Decide?

Some subpanel problems are a clean repair: a loose lug gets re-torqued, a failed breaker gets swapped, a bonding error gets corrected. Others point to a subpanel that’s simply undersized or old enough that individual fixes are just delaying the inevitable. We open it up, test the connections, and tell you honestly which category yours is in. If the enclosure itself is damaged, corroded, or the bus is showing heat damage beyond the connection points, replacement is usually the safer and, over time, cheaper call than repeated repairs.

Permits and Licensing

Subpanel repair work that involves rewiring, replacing the enclosure, or correcting a bonding issue generally requires a permit in Fort Worth. Neighbors Electric is licensed under TECL #41555, and we do this work to NEC code and pull permits where the scope calls for one, so there’s a record the fix was done right. If you’re not sure whether a subpanel that’s already in place was installed to code, an electrical inspection is a straightforward way to find out before it becomes a repair call.

Flat-Rate Pricing

We diagnose the subpanel first, then quote the repair (or the replacement, if that’s the honest recommendation) flat-rate before any work starts.

Subpanel running hot, buzzing, or tripping breakers in your Fort Worth garage or shop? Call (817) 533-0943 or contact us online and we’ll get it diagnosed.