Ice-out has a way of emptying every driveway in the Tri-Lakes on the same Saturday. The camps are calling — from Lake Clear to Silver Lake to the far shore of Upper Saranac — and somewhere in the trunk, between the new dock lines and the screen-door hardware, is the quiet hope that the place made it through winter fine.
It probably did. But here’s the thing we’ve learned opening camps professionally every spring: the difference between finding winter damage and being surprised by it is entirely about the order you do things in. The owner who walks the camp before flipping the main finds the chewed cable behind the fridge. The owner who hits the power and starts unpacking finds it in July, by smell.
So before you throw that main breaker on faith — here’s the sequence we actually run.
Walk it dark: what to check before turning the power on
Everything on this list happens with the main breaker still off. Fifteen minutes, flashlight in hand.
The service entrance, from the ground. Look up at the mast, the weatherhead, and the overhead line coming in. Snow load and falling limbs work on these all winter, and a service cable that’s been pulled partly away from the house, or a cracked mast, is a call-before-touching situation — us or the utility, never a ladder and a Saturday attitude. This is genuinely the most dangerous item on the list, which is why it’s first.
The panel, opened and sniffed. Swing the panel door and look before you energize: rust streaks, water staining, mouse droppings on the breakers, anything chewed, any smell. Moisture that got into a panel over the winter is exactly the discovery you want to make while everything is dead.
The rodent tour. Mice spent five undisturbed months in there, and their favorite material is wire insulation. Check the standard crime scenes: under the kitchen sink, behind the fridge and stove, along the sill plates, in the boathouse, anywhere cables run through warm cavities. Chewed wiring found now is a repair; energized first, it’s a fire risk you’ve armed. (This is also your annual reminder that fall closing, with everything unplugged and entry points sealed, is what makes spring boring — in the good way.)
Power up in stages, not on faith
Here’s the habit that separates a diagnostic from a mystery: don’t throw the main with every breaker on.
Main breaker first, with all the branch breakers off. Then bring circuits up one at a time — kitchen, then lights, then bedrooms — pausing at each, listening, smelling. A breaker that won’t hold, a buzz from the panel, a hot-dust smell that doesn’t clear in a few minutes: stop right there. You now know which circuit has the problem, which turns “the power’s acting weird at camp” into “the kitchen circuit faults” — and that specificity cuts our troubleshooting time (and your bill) dramatically.
The well pump goes last. After the plumbing is reassembled, closed, and filled — never before. A submersible pump energized against open or airlocked lines can run dry, and dry-running pumps have short, expensive lives that end on opening weekend, with a full house and no water. Ask us how many times we’ve seen it. Actually, don’t.
Test every GFCI like the grandkids are watching
Because in a month, they will be.
Every ground-fault device in the camp gets its TEST button pressed at opening: kitchen, bath, exterior outlets, the boathouse, the dock pedestal. Press test — it snaps off. Press reset — power returns. Any device that won’t trip, won’t reset, or has gotten temperamental gets replaced now, in May, while the hardware run is easy.
Here’s why we’re insistent about this one: cold, damp winters genuinely age GFCI devices, and the ones that fail guard exactly the locations where protection matters most — wet, waterfront, barefoot. A dock circuit with a dead GFCI isn’t a minor deferred repair; it’s the specific hazard the device existed to prevent, quietly unprotected all summer. Sixty seconds per outlet. Do them all.
Docks and boathouses get their own inspection
Ice moved this winter — it always does — and whatever it moved, it moved hard. Before re-energizing any shore power: walk the dock and boathouse wiring visually. Conduit heaved or separated at joints. Conductors stretched where the crib shifted. Connections that spent months underwater or frozen into the ice line. Pedestals that took a hit from ice-out debris.
Electricity over water is the one category where we’d rather you be paranoid than proud. If anything looks different than it did in October, leave that breaker off and have it looked at — this is the standard we wrote about at length, and spring re-energizing is exactly when it matters.
Opening weekend is when camps confess
Some springtime truths, learned the hard way: the camp will tell you what it needs in the first hour. The panel that’s had enough seasons announces itself with rust. The single overworked kitchen circuit trips the moment the coffee maker meets the toaster. The EV charger conversation starts in the driveway. The monitoring system gets discussed exactly one winter after it would have caught the February outage.
Early season is the right time to schedule that work — May and June, before July books solid and before small problems get a whole summer of guests to grow in.
Or hand us the keys and skip the checklist
The camps we care for are on a standing schedule: we open in spring, close in fall, and the owner gets a short report — what we checked, what we found, what’s worth watching — instead of a project.
If your camp is anywhere from Paul Smiths to the Champlain shore, the list has room. Call before Memorial Day — after that, we’re mostly in boathouses.