Planning a JEA-Coordinated Service Upgrade Without Killing Your Tenants

The 6–10 week clock starts when JEA gets the application

Every service-entrance upgrade in Duval County runs on JEA's schedule, not yours. From the moment you submit the outage application with stamped drawings, plan on 6–10 weeks before the actual cut-and-reconnect window. That clock includes JEA's engineering review (2–3 weeks), scheduling onto the crew calendar (2–4 weeks), and AHJ permit + inspection coordination on our side (1–2 weeks). If you have multiple tenants, double the prep window for communication.

Temp service or overnight cut?

The first decision on every upgrade: temporary service or overnight switchover. Temp service means a JEA-supplied temporary transformer and a parallel feed to a temp meter base, keeping the building energized while we replace the existing service. It costs 2–4× more and adds 2–3 weeks to the timeline. Overnight switchover means a coordinated 8-hour window — usually 10 PM Saturday to 6 AM Sunday — where the building is dark, we rip out the old service, install the new switchgear, and JEA re-energizes by morning. For office buildings, overnight is almost always right. For continuously occupied facilities, temp service is the only option.

What we submit with the application

JEA wants four documents with every outage application: site plan showing service entry point, single-line diagram of the new switchgear, load calculations per NEC Article 220, and a coordination letter listing the outage window we're requesting. The single-line gets stamped by a Florida PE — we run our designs through a consulting PE who knows JEA's review preferences, which cuts review time from 3 weeks to under 2. We've seen first-time applicants take 5–6 weeks because they submitted incomplete load calcs and got bounced back twice.

Tenant communication is the silent scope item

For multi-tenant buildings, the outage is half the job. We give the property manager a tenant-communication template 4 weeks before the cut: date, exact outage window, what's going dark (everything), what stays up (life-safety lighting via existing generator, if any), and a single dispatch number for problems. Send it out three times — at 4 weeks, 1 week, and 24 hours before. Add elevator coordination if you have one — the elevator company needs to homing the cars before the cut and re-commission after.

The night-of sequence

Our typical 10 PM – 6 AM window: JEA crew arrives at 9:30, we de-energize the main at 10 sharp, JEA cuts the lateral at the transformer, our crew strips out old switchgear and gutters by midnight, new switchgear set and terminated by 3 AM, load-side terminations and labeling by 4:30, JEA re-energizes at 5, and we re-close the main at 5:30 with the building engineer doing a panel-by-panel walk-through. By 6 AM the lights are on and we're cleaning up. If we hit a snag, the contingency plan goes into the JEA work order — typically a backup window the following weekend.

JEA-coordinated service upgrades are predictable once you treat the utility as the long-pole scheduler. Submit complete applications with stamped drawings, choose temp service or overnight switchover with eyes open about cost, and own tenant communication as part of the scope — not as the GC's afterthought.