Electrical Planning for Sarasota Custom Homes, Remodels, and Coastal Builds | CoHarbor Electric

There’s a difference between doing electrical work and doing it right for where you actually live. We say that a lot, but it means something specific here in Sarasota. The salt air off Sarasota Bay, the humidity that never really goes away even in February, the way a storm can roll in off the Gulf and test every connection in your panel — it all matters when you’re wiring a new home or tackling a serious remodel. What works fine in Ohio doesn’t necessarily hold up here.

We’ve been doing custom builds and remodel projects across Sarasota, Lakewood Ranch, Siesta Key, and down through Venice for years. And the thing we keep coming back to is that electrical planning on a coastal build isn’t just about passing inspection. It’s about building something that’s going to perform well five, ten, twenty years from now without giving the homeowner headaches every time a circuit trips or a fixture starts corroding.

So if you’ve got a custom home coming out of the ground, or you’re gutting a 1970s ranch in Southgate and doing it right this time, here’s what you actually need to be thinking about.

Start With Load Planning — Before Anything Else

This is where a lot of projects go sideways early on. People are looking at tile samples and cabinet hardware while the electrical rough-in is already happening, and nobody’s had a real conversation about what this house is going to need to run.

Load planning means sitting down — ideally before a single wire gets pulled — and thinking through everything that’s going to draw power in this home. Not just the obvious stuff like your range and HVAC units. We’re talking EV chargers, whole-home generators, pool equipment, outdoor lighting, a second refrigerator in the garage, a home theater system, a dedicated workshop circuit if the homeowner is into that. The list gets long fast.

On a typical Sarasota custom build we work on, we’re almost always running a 400-amp service from the jump. That might sound like overkill if you grew up in a house with 150-amp service and it seemed fine. But building a new home in 2024 and sizing the panel for how people actually live now — with the technology and energy loads we deal with — means thinking ahead rather than back.

A 200-amp service can work for a modest build. But if there’s any chance of adding an EV charger later, if the kitchen has a Wolf range and a Sub-Zero and a steam oven, if there are two A/C systems or a large pool with heat — you run out of headroom faster than you’d expect. We’d rather have that conversation on day one than get a call two years after move-in.

Panel Placement on a Coastal Build

Inland home, panel goes in the garage or utility room, you’re mostly done thinking about it. Coastal Sarasota? It’s more complicated.

The closer you are to the water — Siesta Key, Bird Key, Lido Key, homes on canals out in the Osprey or Nokomis area — the more aggressively the salt air attacks electrical equipment. We’ve opened panels on Gulf-front properties that were less than ten years old and found corrosion on the bus bars that you’d expect to see on something forty years old. Salt doesn’t give electrical equipment a long lifespan.

Panel location matters. We try to place the main panel on an interior wall if the architecture allows it, keeping it shielded from direct moisture exposure. Corrosion-resistant enclosures, stainless fasteners, proper sealing on conduit entries — these aren’t upgrades on a coastal build, they’re standard practice.

Subpanels for pool equipment and outdoor structures should be in NEMA-rated enclosures appropriate for the exposure level. We’ve seen builders use standard residential boxes on outdoor subpanels here, and the homeowner ends up dealing with it after the warranty period runs out.

What Sarasota’s Climate Does to Wiring

Let’s talk about the humidity piece for a second because it affects decisions throughout a build.

Aluminum vs. Copper in Service Conductors

Larger service entrance conductors in Florida are frequently aluminum — that’s standard and fine when connections are made correctly with anti-oxidant compound and the right terminations. We see problems when corners get cut on the connection side. Aluminum expands and contracts more than copper, and in our heat, that movement adds up over years. A bad connection gets worse.

For branch circuits inside the home, we stick with copper. The cost difference over a whole house build is real but manageable, and the performance over time is worth it here.

GFCI and AFCI — More of Both, Not Less

The NEC requires GFCI protection in bathrooms, kitchens, garages, outdoors, and near water sources. In Florida, we’re frequently running GFCI protection further than the minimum code requires because the combination of humidity and salt air creates fault conditions the code writers in dryer climates didn’t fully anticipate. An extra $80 in GFCI devices is cheap insurance on a coastal build.

AFCI protection — which guards against arc faults in wiring — is required in bedrooms under current code and we extend it throughout living areas on custom builds. Arc faults in wall cavities are serious in any climate. In a Florida home where pest control channels, humidity, and temperature swings work on the wiring over decades, it’s worth the extra protection.

Planning for Outdoor Living — Because This Is Sarasota

Nobody builds a custom home in Sarasota without serious outdoor space. Lanais, pools, outdoor kitchens, fire features, landscape lighting — these aren’t afterthoughts, they’re part of how people use the house. And the electrical planning for outdoor spaces deserves as much attention as anything inside.

Outdoor Kitchens

We’re seeing bigger and bigger outdoor kitchens on Sarasota builds — dedicated refrigeration, a Green Egg and a gas grill and a flat top, a bar with a blender circuit, maybe a keg system. That’s a significant electrical load, and it all needs to be on dedicated circuits with proper weatherproof cover plates and GFCI protection throughout.

Outlet placement in an outdoor kitchen needs to account for how the space is actually going to be used. We’ve seen installs where the builder put two outlets and the homeowner ends up running extension cords all over a $60,000 outdoor kitchen because nobody thought it through.

Pool and Spa Equipment

Pool electrical in Florida is its own specialty. Pump motors, heaters, lighting, automation systems — all of it needs to be bonded correctly, all of it needs the right GFCI protection, all of it needs to meet NEC 680 requirements. Equipotential bonding around a pool is non-negotiable, and it’s something that gets done wrong more than you’d expect.

We also plan for pool automation control systems on most custom builds at this point. Being able to run the pool schedule, control lighting, and monitor equipment from your phone isn’t a luxury item anymore — it’s what homeowners expect, and it needs to be wired for correctly from the start rather than added on later.

Landscape and Low-Voltage Lighting

Landscape lighting on a Sarasota custom build usually involves a combination of line-voltage fixtures for driveway and security lighting and low-voltage systems for accent and path lighting. The line-voltage stuff needs proper weatherproof boxes, correct wire gauge for the run lengths, and GFCI protection at the source.

We also see homeowners later wanting to add landscape lighting zones that weren’t planned for. Conduit sleeves under hardscape during construction are cheap — adding them after the driveway and pool deck are poured is not. We always recommend stubbing out conduit through any concrete flatwork for future lighting or control wire runs, even if nothing is getting installed there today.

Remodels: The Stuff That’s Already in the Walls

A new custom build gives you a clean slate. Remodels are a different conversation.

Sarasota has a lot of mid-century housing stock — homes built in the 1950s through 1970s in neighborhoods like South Gate, Pinecraft, Gulf Gate Estates, and parts of the Bee Ridge corridor. Some of these homes have had multiple owners, multiple partial updates, and wiring that tells a complicated story.

What to Expect When You Open the Walls

We’ve opened walls on remodels in this city and found aluminum branch circuit wiring — not service entrance, but branch circuits throughout the home, which was common in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Aluminum branch wiring needs to be handled correctly. Connections to devices need to use CO/ALR rated outlets and switches, or the circuits need to be pigtailed with copper using approved connectors. It’s not automatically a disaster but it needs to be addressed.

We’ve found cloth-wrapped wiring, ungrounded two-prong circuits, panel boxes from manufacturers that have since been pulled from market over safety concerns — the full range. A remodel is the right time to deal with all of it, not patch around it.

Panel Upgrades During Remodels

Most substantial remodels in older Sarasota homes end up including a panel upgrade, because the existing service is undersized for what the remodel is adding. Adding a new kitchen with modern appliances, adding A/C capacity, adding an EV charger — the 100-amp service that ran a 1965 house adequately doesn’t run a 2024 version of that same house.

A panel upgrade on a remodel is a good time to bring everything up to current code, add surge protection at the main panel, and set the service size for where the homeowner expects to be five or ten years out — not just what they need today.

Generator Planning and Whole-Home Backup

This should be part of every Sarasota custom build conversation. Hurricane season is real, and power outages in Southwest Florida can run for days after a significant storm. Whole-home standby generators — the kind that come on automatically on natural gas or propane — have become a standard expectation on higher-end builds in this market.

Planning for a generator means planning the transfer switch location, planning the gas line routing in coordination with the mechanical contractor, and planning the electrical load it needs to carry. It’s far easier to do this during construction than to retrofit it after the house is done. Retrofitting isn’t impossible, but it costs more and involves working around finished conditions.

For homes where a full standby generator isn’t in the budget at closing, we frequently rough in the transfer switch location and the conduit pathways during construction so that the homeowner can add the generator later without tearing things up. A little planning upfront saves a lot later.

Smart Home and Low-Voltage Infrastructure

Custom home buyers in Sarasota expect smart home capability, and the low-voltage infrastructure to support it needs to be planned alongside the electrical scope.

Structured wiring for networking, speaker systems, security cameras, access control, and whole-home audio all requires conduit, low-voltage boxes, and home run wiring to a central distribution point. None of that happens automatically — it needs to be designed and coordinated during rough-in.

We work alongside AV and smart home integrators on larger custom builds. The key is communication early in the process so the electrical scope and the low-voltage scope don’t end up working against each other in the walls. It happens more than you’d think when those scopes aren’t coordinated.

Working With Your Builder and Architect

One thing we always tell homeowners on custom builds: involve your electrical contractor early. Not just at rough-in, but during design review. We can catch things in the plans that will cause problems later — panel locations that create long circuit runs, kitchen layouts that create code compliance issues, outdoor spaces that aren’t accounted for in the load calculation.

Some homeowners assume the builder is managing all of that coordination. Sometimes they are. Sometimes electrical is treated as a late-stage trade and the planning conversation doesn’t happen the way it should. Asking specifically about load planning, panel sizing, and coordination with the electrical contractor early in the project is a reasonable thing to do.

Talk to Coharbor Electric Before You Break Ground

If you’re planning a custom home anywhere in the Sarasota area — whether that’s a waterfront build on the barrier islands, a new construction in Lakewood Ranch or Palmer Ranch, or a full remodel in an older neighborhood closer to downtown — we’d rather talk to you before the plans are finalized than after the slab is poured.

At Coharbor Electric, we do this work specifically in Southwest Florida. We know what the climate does to equipment, we know what Sarasota County and the municipalities require for permitting, and we know how to plan a system that’s going to hold up and serve the homeowner well for the long run. That’s the job.

Give us a call or reach out through our website. We’re happy to walk through your project, review plans, and help you get the electrical scope right from the start. That conversation is always worth having early.