Seventeen towns, nine utilities, one set of rules.

Roughly $2,250 to $4,500 for a 200 A service upgrade, on 2026 Ontario pricing. Coming up from 60 A usually means a new mast, meter base and panel, so that sits at the top of the range. Going 100 A to 200 A on 1970s or 1980s stock is often just a panel and conductor change, and lands lower. Rural properties trend higher, because the run from the pole is longer and grounding on Shield rock turns into its own small project.

Entirely depends on your town. Orillia is Hydro One, which took over Orillia Power Distribution in 2020. Midland and Tay are Newmarket-Tay Power. Bracebridge, Huntsville and Parry Sound are Lakeland Power, though Gravenhurst is Elexicon. Collingwood, Stayner, Creemore and Thornbury are EPCOR, which bought the old Collus utility. We book it for you — but the utility owns the calendar, and no electrician can talk it into moving.

Not by the code itself, no. In practice your insurer decides, and a great many will not write or renew a policy on a house with live knob and tube in it. Two situations make it genuinely urgent rather than merely awkward: wiring buried in attic insulation, which is the one thing it was never designed for, and a circuit somebody has extended with modern cable spliced in outside a box.

Usually, yes — and this is the good news on aluminium. Insurers frequently accept properly remediated terminations, meaning approved connectors at every device and junction, done throughout, instead of a full replacement. It costs a fraction of a rewire. Ask yours before you book anything, though, because the answer genuinely differs between insurers.

Not always, and it is worth checking before anyone quotes you one. A level 2 charger counts as a continuous load at 125 percent of its rating, so the answer depends on what the rest of the house already draws. On a 100 A service with an electric range, a dryer and a heat pump, there is frequently no room. But an energy management system that sheds the charger when other big loads run can make it work without upgrading anything, for far less money.

Docks get their own section. Section 78 of the Ontario Electrical Safety Code covers marine wharves, docking facilities, fixed and floating piers and boathouses, and rule 78-050 requires ground-fault protection on 15 A and 20 A receptacles on the exterior of them. A great deal of what is installed along this shoreline went in before that applied, and it is still there working away.

No, and the difference catches people out constantly. A contractor’s written assessment is what most insurers are asking for. An Electrical Safety Authority certificate of inspection only exists where a notification of work was filed and inspected at the time — and that is the one lenders and municipalities frequently want. Work done quietly without a notification cannot be certified after the fact, whatever anybody tells you.

No. Quotes are free, and you get the findings in writing whether or not you hire us. If the honest answer is that the work does not need doing at all, or that a subpanel sorts it for a quarter of what a service upgrade costs, then that is what the quote says.