Nothing shocks me like this

The only time most people even look inside their electrical panel box is usually somewhere close to never. The panel box is located adjacent to the meter on the house and its purpose is to control and disburse the electricity that goes throughout the house and cease the power distribution immediately to any area that has a failure or fault. Each panel box has a capacity rating for how many circuits it can handle. For your typical home owner the way to tell if their panel box is ok is to open it and see if there are any extra slots and that there is only one breaker in each slot or one big one that takes up two slots. Although you cannot buy double breakers any longer there are still quite a lot in peoples homes. Double breakers can easily overload the capacity of the panel box creating the opportunity for the worse case scenario - your house can burn down from an electrical fire. The picture below has 12 circuits coming from six slots. We upgraded this home owners panel box for him while we were working on a completely separate project. I'm glad we were there for him.

Over loaded panel box