Temporary power is one of those things nobody thinks about until it isn't there. The day the tower crane can't run, the welders are cold, and the drywall crew is looking at you because their screw guns are dead, you'll wish someone had put temp power on a schedule six weeks earlier. It's cheap to plan and brutally expensive to fix on the fly. A rolling four-week look-ahead is where temp power stops being an afterthought and becomes a coordinated utility that the rest of the trades quietly depend on.
This article walks through how a temp power contractor, and the super riding herd over them, actually sequences the work: from the first pole in the ground to the last spider box on the truck. The theme throughout is lead time. Almost every temp power failure I've watched on a jobsite traces back to something with a long lead time that got started too late.
Start With the Utility, Not the Site
The single biggest scheduling mistake in temp power is treating it as a site activity when the critical path actually lives at the utility. Your electrician can set a service in a day. Getting the utility to energize it can take four, six, sometimes ten weeks depending on the market, the transformer, and whether the pole needs to be set by their crew or yours.
So temp power belongs on a longer horizon than a standard three-week window. Push the utility milestones — application submitted, meter released, transformer scheduled, energization date — out onto a six-week view and work backward from your first power-dependent activity. If the site trailer, the crane, or the first submersible pump needs juice on a certain date, the utility application should already be a closed line item by the time that date enters your four-week look-ahead. Track the utility ticket number and the assigned rep's name right on the schedule. When it slips, and it will, you want to know on week six, not week one.
Sizing the Temporary Service Before You Set It
Undersizing the temp service is the quiet killer. It works fine through excavation and foundations, and then MEP rough-in shows up with resistance heaters, welders, and a dozen crews running battery chargers, and suddenly you're tripping the main every afternoon at two o'clock when everyone's tools are on at once.
Do a real load calc during preconstruction, not a guess. Walk the trades' peak demands, not their nameplate — a drywall crew's actual draw is nothing like a temp heat load in January. Add headroom for the phase of work that draws the most, which on most vertical jobs is the interior fit-out when temp heat, dehumidification, and finish trades all overlap. A few rules of thumb from the field:
- Temporary heat, whether electric or the electric controls on gas units, is almost always the load that catches people off guard. Size for it deliberately.
- Plan the service one size up from your calc if the numbers are close. Upsizing a temp service after it's set means another utility trip and another energization wait.
- Voltage drop matters over the distances on a big site. A run that's fine at the panel can be useless at the far corner of the deck. Account for it before crews complain their tools are "weak."
Distribution: Get It Ahead of the Work, Not Chasing It
Power distribution is where the look-ahead earns its keep, because distribution has to move as the building goes vertical. The principle is simple: temp power leads the trades by at least one floor or one area. If distribution is chasing the work, crews are running hundred-foot cords back to the last available box, which is a trip hazard, a code problem, and a productivity drain all at once.
Sequence it like this. As the deck for a floor is poured and shored, the temp power crew is already staged to set the riser and drop distribution to that level so it's live before the wall and MEP trades arrive. On a look-ahead board, that reads as a temp-power distribution activity sitting one to two weeks ahead of the first framing or layout activity on the same floor. When you build the schedule around location — floor by floor, area by area — those dependencies are obvious at a glance. This is exactly the kind of trade-flow sequencing that location-based look-ahead tools like LookAheadWall are built to make visible, so the temp power drop and the trade that needs it show up in the same place on the same week.
A few distribution details that separate a clean job from a messy one:
- Standardize on GFCI-protected spider boxes and keep a running count of how many you have versus how many the next phase needs. Renting three more on Friday for a Monday start is a fire drill you can schedule away.
- Keep temporary lighting on its own circuits from task power. When someone trips the tool circuit, the stairwell shouldn't go dark.
- Map your box locations against where the trades will actually stand. Power in the middle of a corridor does nobody good if the work is at the unit ends.
Generators, Bridging Power, and the Gaps in Between
Even a well-run job has windows where the permanent or temp utility service isn't available yet but work has to proceed. That's what generators are for, and generator coordination is pure lead-time management. Rental units for a large service aren't sitting on a lot around the corner — spec, fuel plan, and delivery date all want to be on the six-week horizon, not called in the week you need them.
The two places generators bite people: fuel logistics and runtime. Nobody plans the fuel deliveries and then a genset runs dry over a three-day weekend, and Tuesday's pour is cold. Put the fuel schedule on the look-ahead alongside the equipment. And if you're bridging with a generator while waiting on utility energization, keep that dependency loud and visible — the whole reason the generator exists is a date on the utility side, and when that date moves, the generator rental has to move with it.
Safety and Inspections Gate Everything
Temp power doesn't get used because it's installed. It gets used because it's inspected and released. That inspection is a hard gate, and it belongs on the schedule as its own activity with its own duration and its own dependency, not buried as an assumption.
Build in the buffer. Between "installation complete" and "authorized for use," give yourself a realistic window for the AHJ inspection, and don't schedule the first power-dependent trade to start the same morning you expect the green tag. A day or two of buffer there absorbs the reinspection that happens when the inspector flags a missing GFCI or an ungrounded box. Also keep the recurring items on the board:
- Monthly GFCI and assured grounding conductor program checks — these are ongoing obligations, not one-time events, and they lapse the moment nobody's watching the calendar.
- Cord and box condition sweeps. Temp power gear takes abuse. A quarterly walk to pull damaged cords out of service beats an incident report.
- Documentation of every inspection and release. When something goes wrong near a panel, the paper trail is what protects you.
The Handoff to Permanent Power
The transition from temp to permanent is a coordination point that goes sideways more often than it should, because it's a handoff between the temp power scope and the building's permanent electrical scope, and handoffs are where balls get dropped. Sequence it deliberately: permanent service energized and its own inspections passed, then the loads that were on temp power migrated over in a planned order, then temp power decommissioned in the areas now served permanently.
The trap is cutting temp power before permanent is genuinely carrying the load in that area. You want overlap, not a hard cutover. Life safety systems, elevators, and permanent lighting all have their own commissioning sequences that have to line up with the switchover, so this is a place to sit the temp electrician, the permanent electrician, and the commissioning agent in the same short-interval planning conversation and walk it area by area.
Removal and Closeout
Temp power removal is closeout work, and closeout work is where schedules quietly rot because everyone's mentally moved on to the next job. Put the removal on the look-ahead anyway. Poles, panels, distribution, and generators all have to come out, get accounted for on the rental returns, and stop billing. Every week a generator or a rack of spider boxes sits on site after you're done with it is money leaking out of the job with nothing to show for it.
Coordinate the takedown with the final permanent-power cutover and with landscaping or paving that can't happen until the temp poles are gone. And close the paperwork — final inspections signed off, releases filed, rental returns confirmed. The last GFCI test log and the utility disconnect confirmation are cheap to keep and expensive to reconstruct later.
Making It Stick Week to Week
None of this works as a one-time plan pinned to the trailer wall. Temp power is a rolling commitment: every week the distribution has to be one step ahead of the trades, the inspections have to be current, and the utility and generator dependencies have to be honest about where they really stand. That's the whole point of a short-interval, rolling look-ahead — you re-plan the next four weeks every week, so a slipped energization date or a late generator shows up as a problem you can still solve rather than a surprise on the day of the pour.
Run it that way and temp power becomes invisible in the best sense. The crane runs, the tools have juice, the stairwells are lit, and nobody standing on your deck has to think about where their power comes from. That's the mark of a job where somebody put temporary power on the schedule and kept it there.