Saratoga County is building faster than almost anywhere in Upstate New York. Malta and the corridor around the technology campus, Wilton pushing north toward Gansevoort, Halfmoon and Clifton Park filling in, custom homes going up on wooded lots in Greenfield and Ballston. If you are putting a house up here this year, you’re in good company — and you’re making a set of electrical decisions whose cost depends almost entirely on when you make them.
Here are the ones worth settling before the concrete truck arrives.
Size the service for the decade, not the drawing
The single most consequential number on the whole project is the service size, and it gets chosen early by whoever thinks about it first.
Two hundred amps is the sensible floor for a new home here. Whether you need more depends on a load calculation against what’s actually going in: a cold-climate heat pump carrying the heat, an induction range, a hot tub, a shop or detached garage, an EV charger — or two, eventually. Stack three or four of those on a 200-amp service and the math gets tight; stack them on a service someone sized by habit and you’ll be doing a panel upgrade inside five years on a house that isn’t old yet.
The calculation costs nothing at the drawing stage. Buying the capacity once is always cheaper than buying it twice.
Settle the utility question early
Overhead or underground? If underground — and on most new lots here it is — the trench route, depth, and conduit need to be coordinated while the excavator is still on site. Bringing a machine back for a service trench after the site is graded and seeded is one of the more avoidable line items in residential construction.
The utility’s own timeline matters too. New service applications and meter set scheduling take what they take; starting that clock early is free, and starting it late holds up everything that needs permanent power.
Put the panel somewhere a human can reach
Panels get located by whatever wall is left over. It shows.
A good panel location is accessible without moving storage, has the code-required working clearance in front of it, isn’t in a finished space where the door will annoy someone forever, and has room around it for the sub-panel or generator transfer switch that may come later. In a house with a mechanical room, that’s usually the answer. In one without, it’s worth ten minutes at the framing stage rather than a lifetime of squeezing past a water heater.
Rough in for the things you haven’t bought yet
This is where new construction pays its biggest dividends, and it’s almost embarrassingly cheap while the walls are open:
- Conduit to the garage for a future EV charger, even if the car is years away
- A chase to the roof for solar, if there’s any chance of it
- A generator interlock or transfer provision at the panel — particularly if a heat pump will be the only heat
- Cat6 to the office, the TV walls, and the far bedrooms, because Wi-Fi doesn’t survive real construction materials
- Whole-house surge protection at the panel, protecting a house now full of circuit boards
- Deeper boxes and neutrals at the switches you may want to make smart later
Each is a fraction of a percent of the build. Each is a project after drywall.
Design the lighting before the ceiling closes
Recessed lighting laid out on a grid is the default, and it’s why so many new houses have glare over the sofa and shadows on the counter. Layout should follow the furniture plan and how the room gets used: task light where work happens, ambient light for the space, accent where something deserves it, and dimming zones that match.
That’s a conversation with the drawings open, not a decision made by whoever is holding the hole saw. Same for switch locations — which wall you actually reach for when you walk into a room is not always the one on the plan.
Get the electrical on the plans
All of it comes back to one thing: an electrical design package — load calculations, panel schedule, power and lighting layouts — done before framing rather than improvised during it. For permit sets it’s what the reviewer wants. For your builder it’s what makes the rough-in predictable. For you it’s the document that says what you’re buying before anyone opens a wall.
We do that design work and then build what we drew, which is the whole reason the two match. If you’re building in Saratoga Springs, Malta, Wilton, Clifton Park, or anywhere else in the county, send us the plans — ideally before the excavator leaves.