Panel upgrades
Panel Upgrades Across Georgian Bay
Sixty amps will not carry a heat pump, and most insurers now want the fuse panel gone. This is the job that pays for itself when the policy renews.
A sixty-amp service was sized for a house with a stove, a fridge and a furnace fan. It was not sized for a heat pump, a hot tub, a car charger and a basement suite, and around this region it is increasingly being asked to carry all four.
Why the panel is suddenly the problem
Three things arrived at once. Heat pumps replaced oil and propane in a lot of the older stock. Electric vehicles put a second continuous load on the same service. And insurers began treating fuse panels and undersized services as a rating factor rather than a curiosity, which turns a technical question into a renewal deadline.
The result is that a service upgrade is now the most common large electrical job in this region, and it is very often booked by somebody who was not thinking about their panel a month earlier.
What the work actually involves
A service upgrade is not only a new panel. It is the mast or the underground lateral, the meter base, the bonding and grounding brought up to current code, the service entrance conductors, and a notification filed with the Electrical Safety Authority before the work starts. The distributor has to disconnect and reconnect, which means the schedule is theirs rather than yours.
Who disconnects the service depends on where you are
That coordination is the part that varies most across this service area, because the distributor is different in almost every town. Midland and Tay are Newmarket-Tay Power. Orillia has been Hydro One since it acquired Orillia Power Distribution in 2020. Bracebridge, Huntsville and Parry Sound are Lakeland Power. Collingwood, Stayner, Creemore and Thornbury are EPCOR. Booking a panel upgrade without knowing which of those you are dealing with is how a one-day job becomes a three-week one.
Sixty to two hundred, or one hundred to two hundred
The jump from 60 A usually means a new mast, a new meter base and a new panel, and often a grounding electrode that never existed. Going from 100 A to 200 A on a house from the 1970s or 1980s is frequently a panel and conductor change with the mast reused. The second is materially cheaper, and it is worth establishing which one you have before budgeting.
What it costs here
Published Ontario ranges for a 200 A service upgrade run roughly $2,250 to $4,500 in 2026. Rural properties on this side of the region trend to the upper end, because the run from the pole is longer and the ground is often shallow soil over Shield rock, which makes a grounding electrode its own small project.
Talk to a Midland electrical contractor
Tell us the town, roughly when the building was put up, and what the panel looks like — fuses or breakers, and the number on the main. Those three things decide whether you are looking at an afternoon, a scheduled job, or a conversation with your distributor first, and they are usually enough to price it without anybody driving anywhere.