Panel upgrades
Panel Upgrades, Midland to Muskoka
Sixty amps was plenty in 1962. It will not carry a heat pump, and your insurer has probably noticed the fuse panel by now.
A sixty-amp service was sized for a house with a stove, a fridge and a furnace fan. Nobody in 1962 was planning for a heat pump, a hot tub, a car charger and a basement suite.
Around here it is increasingly being asked to carry all four.
Three things arrived at once
Heat pumps replaced oil and propane across a lot of the older stock. Electric cars put a second continuous load on the same service. And insurers stopped treating fuse panels as a curiosity and started treating them as a rating factor — which turns a technical question into a renewal deadline, usually with about three weeks of notice.
So the electrical panel upgrade is now the most common large job in this region, and it is very often booked by somebody who was not thinking about their panel a month ago.
A fourth trigger is the brand on the panel door. A home inspector who finds a Commander, Sylvania or CEB panel writes it into the report, and the insurer reads the report.
What the work actually is
Not just a new panel. The mast or the underground lateral, the meter base, the service entrance conductors, bonding and grounding brought up to current code, and a notification filed with the Electrical Safety Authority before anybody starts. Then your distributor comes out to disconnect and reconnect.
That last part is what takes the time, and it is not up to us.
Which is where your town comes in
The distributor changes almost every time you cross a boundary here. Midland and Tay are Newmarket-Tay Power. Orillia has been Hydro One since it bought Orillia Power Distribution in 2020. Bracebridge, Huntsville and Parry Sound are Lakeland Power. Collingwood, Stayner, Creemore and Thornbury are EPCOR. Bradford, Alliston and Penetanguishene are Alectra. Innisfil is InnPower, Wasaga has its own, Orangeville still owns its own, and Gravenhurst is Elexicon rather than Lakeland despite sitting twenty minutes from Bracebridge.
Booking a service upgrade without knowing which of those you are dealing with is how a one-day job turns into a three-week one.
Do I need a 200 amp service, or will 100 do
Honestly, 100 A is enough for a great many houses in this region, and it is cheaper. What tips it to 200 is the combination — heat pump plus car charger plus electric range plus a shop out back. Add a second continuous load to a 100 A service and the arithmetic gets tight quickly.
The load calculation answers it in an afternoon, and it is worth doing before anyone quotes you anything.
What it costs, and what moves it
Published Ontario ranges for a 200 A upgrade run about $2,250 to $4,500 in 2026.
Coming up from 60 A usually means a new mast, a new meter base, a new panel and quite often a grounding electrode that never existed in the first place. That is the upper end. Going 100 A to 200 A on a 1970s or 1980s house is frequently a panel and conductor change with the mast reused, which is materially cheaper. Worth establishing which one you have before you set a budget.
Rural properties trend higher
The run from the pole is longer. And on this side of the region the ground is often shallow soil over Canadian Shield rock, which turns a grounding electrode into its own small project rather than a line item.
Talk to a Midland electrical contractor
Tell us three things: the town, roughly when the building went up, and what the panel looks like — fuses or breakers, and the number on the main. That is usually enough to say whether you are looking at an afternoon, a scheduled job, or a conversation with your distributor first. Often enough to price it, too, without anybody driving anywhere.