Identify your service style at the meter
There are four arrangements, the difference is inside the enclosure, and picking the wrong one produces a drawing that looks right and is wrong.
Answers the Service style question during setup.
Everything in this article can be read with the enclosure door open and every metal cover left in place. Do not remove a cover, and do not open a meter enclosure. If a number is not visible that way, it is a question for a licensed electrician, not something to go looking for.
“The grey box next to the meter is just "the panel". One box, one name, and you can tell what you need from the outside.”
The common misreading. Here is what is actually true.
Standing at the meter, all four service styles look about the same: a meter, a grey enclosure, some conduit. The difference that matters is inside, and it decides where the service disconnect lives and where the neutral and ground are bonded together. Those two facts drive most of the rest of the design.
This is the answer worth getting right on the first pass. Pick the wrong style and nothing errors out. The design stays internally consistent, the drawing looks clean, and the mistake shows up at plan review or in the field. No automatic check can catch it, because from the software side a wrong-but-consistent answer is indistinguishable from a right one.
The four styles, and what makes each one different
Meter-Main combo: the meter and the main breaker share one enclosure, and the breakers for the house are in there too. One box does everything.
Separate panel: the meter is its own small enclosure with nothing in it but the meter, and conduit runs from it to a separate main panel, usually inside the garage or on an interior wall.
With disconnect: the meter feeds a separate disconnect switch, and the disconnect feeds the panel. Three pieces of equipment in a row.
Meter-disconnect: the meter and a disconnect share one enclosure, and that combined unit feeds a panel somewhere else. It looks like a meter-main combo from the outside, but there are no branch breakers inside it.
Why the wrong pick is expensive
The service disconnect is the first place power can be shut off after the meter. Whichever piece of equipment holds it also holds the neutral-to-ground bond and the connection to the grounding electrodes. Move the disconnect and you move both of those, which changes the drawing, the labels, and sometimes the interconnection method that is legal on the job.
That is why "one box, one name" fails. A meter-main combo and a meter-disconnect look nearly identical from the driveway and put the disconnect in the same enclosure, but only one of them has the branch breakers, and that changes what the panel downstream actually is.
How to get the answer
Open the hinged outer door of the enclosure next to the meter and leave every metal cover inside it in place. What you can see through the cover cutout settles it.
- 1Rows of branch breakers inside, plus one larger breaker: meter-main combo.
- 2A single lever or one large breaker and nothing else: a disconnect. If it shares the enclosure with the meter it is a meter-disconnect; if it is its own box between meter and panel, the style is with disconnect.
- 3Meter alone, nothing but the meter socket, with conduit heading to a panel elsewhere: separate panel.
- 4Still unsure? Follow the conduit leaving the enclosure. Where it lands is the panel, and what is left behind at the meter is the disconnect.
- 5On the two disconnect styles the panel downstream is usually a feedthrough panel, and the software asks about it separately.
- 6If the enclosure carries a utility seal, stop. The seal belongs to the utility and cutting it is a service-tampering matter in most jurisdictions regardless of why you did it. Photograph the outside and the label, and get the rest from the utility or a licensed electrician.
What to photograph
- The meter face, including any sticker on the socket.
- The enclosure with its outer door open and all inner covers in place, so the breaker handles and the label are visible.
- The label on the inside of the door.
This is guidance for reading equipment that is already visible and for describing it on a drawing. It is not instruction for electrical work. Any work on service equipment, panels, or conductors is for a licensed electrician, and local code and utility rules govern.
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