The four panel brands that get flagged, and what is actually wrong with each
If an inspector, an insurer or an electrician has just named one of these, this page tells you what the documented problem is, whether there is a recall (in most cases there is not, and that gets misreported constantly), and what usually happens next. We are not electricians. What we can do is get the facts straight so you can have a better conversation with one.
One thing before you open anything
You can read the brand off the panel door or the label inside it without removing the cover. Do not remove the cover. Behind it are the service conductors, which are live even with the main breaker off, and on two of these brands the specific documented failure is that the breaker reads off while the circuit is still energised. An electrician can identify any of these in minutes.
Federal Pacific Electric
installed roughly 1950 to 1990, most commonly 1960s and 1970sThe most widely installed problem panel in American housing, and the one insurers are most likely to refuse.
Independent testing of Stab-Lok breakers has repeatedly found failure-to-trip rates far above other equipment: a meaningful proportion do not open under a sustained overload or a short circuit. A breaker exists to interrupt current before the wiring behind the wall reaches ignition temperature, so one that does not trip is not a degraded protection, it is an absent one. The panel can look and behave perfectly normally right up until the moment it matters.
Recall status: There has been no CPSC recall of FPE panels. The Commission closed its investigation in 1983 citing insufficient data and budget to establish the defect to the legal standard, not a finding that the equipment was safe. This distinction gets misreported constantly in both directions. What did happen: a New Jersey court found in a class action that the company had knowingly mislabelled breakers as UL approved when they did not meet the standard.
How to identify a Federal Pacific Electric panel, and what replacement costs →Zinsco
installed roughly 1950 to 1970, with Sylvania-branded stock installed into the 1970sBreakers can weld themselves to the bus, so the switch reads off while the circuit is still live.
The connection between the breaker and the aluminium bus bar degrades and overheats. Two things follow. The breaker can fail to trip on a fault, and it can melt into the bus so that moving the handle to off no longer disconnects anything. The second is the one that injures people: someone switches off a circuit to work on it, tests nothing, and the conductor is still energised. Damage to the bus itself is why this is a panel problem rather than a breaker problem.
Recall status: No CPSC recall was issued. Zinsco stopped manufacturing in the 1970s and the brand no longer exists, which is part of the practical problem: nothing is being recalled because there is nobody left to recall it, and new breakers are not manufactured.
How to identify a Zinsco panel, and what replacement costs →Challenger
installed roughly 1980 to 1990Overheating at the breaker-to-bus connection, with poor parts availability.
Overheating where the breaker meets the bus, and a documented history of breakers failing to trip. Challenger acquired some of the tooling and design lineage behind earlier problem equipment, which is why the failure pattern looks familiar.
Recall status: A recall was issued covering certain Challenger-branded circuit breakers, not the panels as a class. If you have a Challenger panel, the question of whether your specific breakers are within a recalled range is one for an electrician with the catalogue numbers in front of them.
How to identify a Challenger panel, and what replacement costs →Pushmatic
installed roughly 1950 to 1980Not in the same safety category as the others, but a dead end for anything modern.
Pushmatic equipment does not carry the failure-to-trip record the others do, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than lumping it in. The real problems are ageing and obsolescence: the push-button mechanism stiffens with age and can become unreliable, there is no main breaker in many installations, and no AFCI or GFCI breakers are made for these panels at all.
Recall status: No recall. This is an obsolescence problem, not a defect problem.
How to identify a Pushmatic panel, and what replacement costs →Want us to look at your specific situation?
Tell us what you are dealing with and we will come back to you. Being straight about what this is: we are building toward introducing homeowners to local electricians and we are not there yet, so right now this reaches us and nobody else.
Does a flagged panel mean you need a bigger service?
Not necessarily, and they are separate questions worth keeping separate. A hazardous panel needs replacing whatever its rating. Whether the replacement should be larger than what you have is a load calculation, and if you are replacing the panel anyway that is the moment to answer it, because upsizing during a replacement costs far less than doing it again later.
Run the NEC 220.83 load calculation →On the word “recall”
Three of the four brands here have never been recalled, and a great deal of what is written about them says otherwise. That matters in both directions. A page claiming a recall that does not exist is wrong, and so is reading “no recall” as “found to be safe”. In the Federal Pacific case the Consumer Product Safety Commission closed its investigation citing insufficient data and budget to establish the defect to the legal standard, which is a statement about the Commission's resources rather than about the equipment. We have written what each source actually says on each brand page.