Almost nobody goes looking for their electrical service size. You find out you have a 60 amp service because something else has been refused: a heat pump quote, a car charger, an insurance renewal, or an electrician telling you a circuit cannot be added.
Then the question becomes what it actually costs you, and whether it has to be dealt with now.
How to tell what you have
Open the panel door, but do not remove the cover. There are three things worth looking at.
The main breaker. At the top or bottom of the panel there is usually one larger breaker, stamped with a number. That number is your service size. If it reads 60, that is your answer.
A fuse block instead. If there is no main breaker but a pull-out block holding cartridge fuses, you almost certainly have a 60 amp service, and a fuse panel besides. Both matter to an insurer.
The panel label. Worth noting because it misleads people. A panel can be rated for 100 or 200 amps and still be fed by a 60 amp service. The rating on the box is what the equipment can handle, not what is arriving at it. The main breaker or fuse is the number that counts.
If none of that is clear, take a photograph of the open door and send it. It is usually obvious from a picture.
What 60 amps was designed for
It is worth being fair to it. When most of these services went in, a house had lighting, a few receptacle circuits, an electric range and a fridge. Heating was oil or coal. Hot water was often oil-fired. Sixty amps was genuinely adequate, and in a house that has not changed since, it still runs without complaint.
The problem is not that the service degraded. It is that everything around it changed.
What a 60 amp service rules out today
A heat pump. This is the most common way people find out. Nova Scotia has adopted heat pumps faster than most of the country, and a ducted system in particular needs capacity that simply is not there.
An EV charger. A Level 2 charger wants a dedicated 240 volt circuit sized to the unit. On 60 amps, the load calculation almost never allows it.
Electric hot water alongside an electric range. Either on its own is usually manageable. Both, on 60 amps, is tight before anything else is added.
A basement suite or a rented flat. Additional cooking and heating load on a service that was sized for one household.
A hot tub. Small compared with the others, but it is a dedicated circuit the calculation has no room for.
Sometimes, any new circuit at all. This is the version most people meet: not a refusal on principle, just no capacity left to give.
Why insurers ask about it
Insurers are not asking about amperage for its own sake. A 60 amp service is a strong indicator of a house that has not had electrical work in a long time, and what usually travels with it is a fuse panel and, on the Halifax peninsula and in older Dartmouth, original knob-and-tube wiring.
Different insurers treat it differently. Some decline, some surcharge, some ask for a letter from a licensed electrician. If yours has raised it, the useful thing is to find out exactly what they want in writing before any work starts, because it is far easier to produce the right documentation as the job runs than to reconstruct it afterwards.
What an upgrade actually involves
A service change is a day’s work in most houses, with the power off for part of it. It means a new panel, usually a new meter base and mast, grounding and bonding brought to current code, and the existing circuits moved across and labelled. It is permitted and inspected work, and the utility has to attend to disconnect and reconnect, so it is scheduled rather than done on the spot.
The decision worth making carefully is 100 amps against 200. A load calculation answers it. The short version: if a heat pump, a car, or a finished basement is plausible within a decade, 200 is usually the cheaper answer once, rather than twice.
Does it have to be done now
If nothing is failing, nothing is being refused, and your insurer has not raised it, then no. A 60 amp service that is not being asked to do more than it was built for is not an emergency.
It becomes urgent when three things are true at once: the service is 60 amps, the panel is a fuse panel, and there is original wiring in the walls. That combination is where the actual risk sits, and it is common enough in older Halifax housing to be worth checking rather than assuming.
If you want to know which of those apply to your house, a photograph of the panel and a look in the attic will usually settle it.