Sometimes the service genuinely cannot carry another circuit. More often, someone has said it cannot without checking. Both of those situations start with the same short piece of work.
Start with the calculation, because it is frequently the whole answer
A whole-home load calculation adds the fixed loads against the service rating and reports what remains. There are three possible outcomes and they are wildly different jobs:
Headroom exists. Add the circuit. No upgrade, no utility involvement, no scheduling around anybody else. This is the common result in the tract housing built across Cedar Park, Leander, Hutto, Buda and Kyle since the late nineties, where 200-amp services were standard and the panel usually sits conveniently on a garage wall.
Headroom is close. A load-management device lets the charger use capacity that exists but is not simultaneously available — pausing or reducing charging when the air conditioning and the oven are both running. It costs a fraction of a service upgrade and it is the right answer far more often than it gets offered.
The service is genuinely the limit. Then the upgrade is real, and worth doing properly.
We run the calculation before quoting anything in this category. It regularly means telling someone they do not need what they came asking for.
Central Austin is where this is a real conversation
The pre-war and mid-century stock inside the central neighbourhoods — Hyde Park, Travis Heights, Rosedale, Bouldin — was wired for a household with one air conditioner and no electric range. A hundred-amp service was generous at the time. It is not generous against a heat pump, an induction hob and a truck that wants sixty amps overnight.
These jobs also tend to surface adjacent work that the calculation was not looking for: a grounding electrode system that no longer meets the adopted code, a service entrance that has been extended rather than replaced, or surviving cloth-insulated branch circuits behind an otherwise modern panel face. We will tell you what we find and what genuinely has to be dealt with now versus what can wait.
The utility decides the schedule, and there are six of them
This is the part that catches people who have moved from a single-utility metro. A service upgrade requires the supply to be disconnected and reconnected, and that is the utility’s work, not ours.
Austin Energy and Georgetown Utility Systems are municipal. San Marcos runs its own. Pedernales and Bluebonnet are member cooperatives, where you are a member rather than a customer and the process reflects it. Oncor is a delivery utility on the competitive market. They have different requirements, different lead times and different paperwork, and the boundaries follow service territory rather than city limits.
We identify which one serves the meter before quoting a timeline, because a date given without that is fiction.
What the work involves
Panel and breakers matched as a listed combination — never mixed brands sharing a bus, which is a common and genuinely unsafe shortcut. Service entrance conductors sized for the new rating. Grounding brought up to the adopted code, which older properties frequently need. Existing circuits re-terminated and torqued to specification during the transfer, rather than moved across and hoped for.
Permitted and inspected, with utility sign-off before reconnection.