Oakland Parents Bought Classroom Air Conditioners. Old Wiring Decides When They Run.

Parents at one Oakland elementary school bought portable air conditioners after a brutal heat week, and the building couldn't run them all at once. Between a cooling machine and a cool room sits a chain of wiring owned by different people, and each owner works on a different clock.

Carol Guggino is the principal of Chabot Elementary, a public school in Oakland's Rockridge neighborhood, near the foot of the hills. About a year ago, during a stretch of heat, she said the classrooms became "unbearable." She took the problem to the school's parent-teacher association, and the PTA spent roughly $16,000 on portable air conditioners.

This fall the teachers plugged them in. "This building is so old that it's blowing fuses when everybody's running because it takes up so much power," Guggino told KALW's Julia Haney earlier this month. So the teachers take turns. Some rooms get cooled while others wait. On the hot days, Guggino said of her students, "They can't focus."

Since then the district has put heat-blocking film on Chabot's windows. A few teachers thought it helped, Guggino told KALW. Most told her they noticed little difference.

I keep coming back to what the teachers are doing in that building, because I know it. In the Fruitvale apartment where I grew up, nobody ran the microwave while the space heater was on. You learned which outlets shared a fuse the same way you learned which stairs creaked. Nobody sat us down and explained it; we figured it out by losing the lights.

Chabot's teachers are doing that at the scale of a school, and they've run into the part of heat adaptation that rarely makes the news. Most coverage treats cooling as a shopping problem: which unit, which rebate, how loud it is. The machine is usually the easy part. What's harder is getting enough electricity to the outlet, and knowing who decides when that can happen.

How power reaches a wall outlet

Electric current is measured in amps. Every piece of a building's electrical system can carry only so many amps before its wires get dangerously hot. Between the street and a classroom outlet, power passes through four links, and each has its own limit.

The first is the circuit, a wire running from a group of outlets back to a fuse or breaker. A fuse is a weak spot put there on purpose. When too much current flows, it breaks, so the wire inside the wall doesn't overheat. When Chabot's fuses blow, in other words, the safety system is doing its job.

All the circuits start at the panel, the metal box in a basement or utility closet. The panel has its own total limit. Each circuit can stay within its own limit while the building as a whole asks for more than the panel can safely deliver.

The panel is fed by the service: the wires and meter connecting the building to the utility. The service was sized for a certain amount of power when it went in, and only the utility can make it bigger. In Oakland, that utility is Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E.

Past the service is the grid, meaning the neighborhood lines and transformers and, behind them, the larger substations. Sometimes the street itself can't carry any more.

The farther from the outlet a problem sits, the more it costs to fix and the longer it takes. Who's in charge of the fix changes too as you move outward, from the building owner to PG&E to the California Public Utilities Commission, the state agency that regulates PG&E. An electrician might solve a first-link problem in an afternoon by spreading the machines across more circuits. A fourth-link problem can take years.

Chabot's blown fuses tell us the building hits a limit when everyone runs a machine. They don't tell us which link ran out of room. No electrician's assessment of the building has been made public, and that assessment is what would show whether Chabot needs a rewiring job or a place in PG&E's line. If one exists, nobody outside the district can see it.

What the district knows, and what it has funded

The Oakland Unified School District has already told its own community that its buildings weren't wired for this. Its frequently asked questions page on classroom heat asks parents and staff not to install portable air conditioners on their own, because old wiring can't safely take large new loads. KALW's report doesn't say whether Chabot's PTA bought its units before that guidance went up or with district approval. Either way, the school has now shown in practice what the guidance warns about.

The same page puts a number on the problem. Bringing heating and cooling up to standard across the district would cost more than $500 million, including electrical work and air conditioning for about 2,100 classrooms. The district doesn't say when every school would have it.

So far it has committed $12 million from Measure Y, a school construction bond Oakland voters approved: $8 million at first and another $4 million in June 2026, according to the district. That's less than 2.5 percent of the district's own estimate.

Some of that money is paying for "cooling rooms," single air-conditioned spaces where students can go to recover. The district's October project list shows 26 schools getting one. Eleven are finished, and fifteen are underway or scheduled. Chabot isn't one of them. It shows up on the list only for its window film, the measure most of its teachers told Guggino made little difference.

According to the district, campuses with no air conditioning at all get cooling rooms first. It also weighs neighborhood heat, student age, sun exposure and the needs of lower-income students. Chabot fits awkwardly against that first rule, since it now has air conditioners, bought by parents, that it can't run all at once. The published criteria don't say how a school in that spot gets counted. The district hasn't published any school's score, and there's no public ranking of schools waiting for electrical upgrades. The teachers rotating machines this fall have nothing to look at that would tell them how long the rotation will go on.

The most detailed electrical project in the district's records is at Sequoia Elementary, where schoolwide wiring upgrades are planned alongside a boiler replacement so the building can support modern heating and cooling. It's in early planning, with no published cost or finish date.

California's Division of the State Architect reviews school construction for safety and accessibility. But its current rules let alterations costing $134,000 or less skip plan review, and many larger jobs skip part of it. Like-for-like electrical repairs get their own exemption, though it doesn't cover work that replaces a building's electrical service. Nothing in the record suggests state review is what stretches these waits into years.

Money explains more of it. CalSHAPE, a state program that paid for ventilation and heating-and-cooling work in schools, stopped taking new ventilation applications in 2024 because of budget limits. In September, CalMatters reported that an effort to reopen it had failed, and that $191 million in unspent funds is going back to the utilities. Lawmakers did pass a measure giving schools with existing awards three more years to finish their projects, CalMatters reported. Oakland says CalSHAPE paid for the classroom temperature sensors it's installing, which will at least document how hot the rooms get. I found no record of CalSHAPE money going to Chabot's wiring.

What parent fundraising can buy

Chabot has more money behind it than most Oakland schools. One standard way to gauge family income at a school is the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals. In the district's 2024–25 figures, Chabot is at 35 percent. Fruitvale Elementary, a few blocks from where I grew up, is at 96 percent. Garfield and East Oakland Pride are at 98.

That 35 percent still means about a third of Chabot's families are low-income, which tends to get lost when people talk about schools near the hills as if every family there were comfortable.

The gap between the parent groups is wider than the gap between the student bodies. Tax filings collected by ProPublica for the year ending June 2025 show the Chabot PTA took in $752,626. The PTA says it spends about $1,300 per student and supports an Oakland school equity fund. The Emerson Oakland PTA, at a school where 74 percent of students qualify for meal help, took in $144,330, and after costs its fundraising netted $26,489. A $16,000 air conditioner purchase would have eaten more than half of that.

I went in expecting a simple story about rich parents buying their way out of the heat. The records point somewhere more tangled. Fruitvale, the high-poverty school, already has a finished cooling room. Chabot, the school with the money, has air conditioners it can't fully run.

Parent fundraising can buy the piece of heat relief that comes in a box. The wiring inside the walls, the service and the lines under the street arrive through bond money, district priorities and PG&E. On that track, the district reached Fruitvale first, which is what its stated priorities say it should do.

The PTA's money bought one more thing, though nobody planned it. Teachers found the building's limit by plugging in and watching the fuses go. At schools where parents never had $16,000 for air conditioners, nobody may ever have run that test, and nobody has published what would happen in those buildings if they did.

The same four links at home

Every house and apartment has the same four links, and there's more research on homes than on schools.

Researchers don't agree on how many homes have small panels. A peer-reviewed 2026 study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Laboratory of the Rockies estimates that 37 percent of California single-family homes have panels rated at 100 amps or less, a size common in older houses. A 2024 UCLA study using a different method put the figure at 35 percent.

For the narrower group of panels below 100 amps, the estimates swing much more. UCLA found 3 percent, a western-states survey found 21 percent, and participants in a state rebate program came in near 1 percent. The UCLA authors trace those gaps to homeowners misreading their panels and to programs drawing unusual households.

Both studies point out that a small panel doesn't automatically mean you need an upgrade. Empty breaker slots, what's already running and which cooling machine you pick all change the answer.

When a home needs only a new panel, that part usually goes quickly. A 2026 national survey by the Berkeley lab, drawing on contractors, utilities and permit offices, put the typical cost of replacing a house's main panel at $3,500, and most single-family and small apartment projects in the survey were done within a month. PG&E estimates $3,000 to $8,000 for a full upgrade where the lines are overhead, and potentially $20,000 or more where they run underground and need trenching.

The long waits start when PG&E has to do work. Two state laws, SB 410 and AB 50, pushed the Public Utilities Commission to set deadlines for utilities to connect or upgrade customers, a process the industry calls "energization." In a September 2024 decision, the commission set these limits:

The most recent PG&E report I could find, filed in April and covering applications through 2025, shows two clocks running side by side. For new or larger lines to a building, PG&E says its own share of the time averaged 123 calendar days, comfortably inside a target counted in business days. From application to power on, though, the full wait averaged 313 calendar days, more than ten months. PG&E puts the difference on customers, contractors and permit offices. Simple panel upgrades came in close to the target, at 30 business days of PG&E's time and 42 in total.

Those averages, PG&E says, represent 48 percent of applications submitted and energized in that period. Open and cancelled cases aren't included. At a June review of the March report's data, regulators counted 13,755 open PG&E projects, and 349 of them had passed the maximum deadline.

At the same workshop, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a clean energy advocacy group, raised two objections: that the utilities' numbers couldn't be consistently verified, and that each utility counts differently, so the figures can't be fairly compared. That's a dispute over method, and regulators haven't ruled against PG&E. My colleague Seth D. Carrington has written about what counting only finished cases leaves out: the people whose lives change while their case is still open.

The statistics can't show you what the waiting feels like from inside an Oakland apartment. The closest account I found is from 2023, when KQED followed Cheryl Kleinsmith and Ismael Plasencia, renters raising two children in a unit that was uncomfortable in summer and in winter. They persuaded their landlords to join the Oakland EcoBlock, a state-funded project converting a whole block to electric heat pumps, machines that both heat and cool. The owners agreed on one condition: the tenants had to go to the project meetings and pass along what they learned. The family took that on. Then PG&E determined the street lines needed upgrading, the fourth link, and even on an accelerated track that added another six months.

According to the state's project update, PG&E finished the larger line in 2024, and by 2025 contractors had installed heat pumps in 24 of the block's 25 units. The record doesn't say which unit is still waiting. This was a family inside a state-funded project, with engineers and the state on their side, and they still spent months waiting on the lines serving their street.

Renters can't apply for the wiring

Kleinsmith and Plasencia got as far as PG&E's line only because their landlords said yes, and that agreement cost the family hours at project meetings. Most renters never get that far. The panel, the wiring and the service belong to the landlord, so a tenant can't apply for any of it.

California's landlord-tenant guide requires landlords to keep electrical systems, wiring included, in good working order, and to keep the heat working. Air conditioning isn't on the list. A tenant can demand safe wiring, but no general state rule requires wiring strong enough to run cooling.

The state has edged toward the question without getting there. SB 655, signed in 2025, declares that homes should stay below a safe maximum indoor temperature and directs agencies to consider that when they write rules starting in 2027. It sets no number and gives tenants no right to install anything. AB 2616 would have set an 82-degree indoor limit and let tenants install cooling, but its April hearing was cancelled at the author's request, and the bill stalled.

The one California law I found that deals directly with wiring capacity covers mobile home parks. Since January, Civil Code §798.44.2 has largely barred park managers from blocking residents' cooling systems. One exception applies when the lot's electrical supply can't handle the load, and even then a government inspector has to document that in writing. So in a mobile home park, "the wiring can't take it" has to be checked by a public official before it counts as a reason. I found no equivalent protection for people renting apartments.

Help paying for panel work has mostly dried up for now. California's share of federal home electrification rebates came in two pools. The apartment pool offered up to $4,000 per qualifying household for a new electric panel, with the property owner applying. The single-family pool covered heat-pump heating and cooling systems. Single-family funds were fully reserved on February 24 and multifamily funds on September 1, and no new applications are being taken. The state says a second round will be announced later.

Two local programs can pay for panel work, each with its own income and building rules: Empower My Home in selected Oakland neighborhoods, and the Equitable Building Decarbonization program in East and West Oakland. Both need the landlord's approval before a renter can even get an assessment, and signing up guarantees nothing. A tenant gets that help only if the landlord agrees, a contractor assesses the building, and the money is still there.

Cooling that asks less of the building

Some approaches get around the upgrade by asking less of the building.

New York City's public housing authority tested window heat pumps in 24 apartments at Woodside Houses in Queens. The units plug into a standard household outlet, and across the test no breakers tripped and no fuses blew, either in the apartments or in the building's shared wiring. Summer indoor temperatures averaged 75 to 78 degrees, depending on the brand. Regina Fred, who had lived for 27 years with steam heat she couldn't adjust, told the Associated Press how quiet the units were and how much it meant to set her own temperature. This route still takes labor. Trained two-person crews needed 45 to 70 minutes per installation, and the units came with filter cleaning and drainage upkeep that someone has to keep up with.

Another approach manages when machines run, so their combined draw stays under the building's limit. The public evidence I found is thin: one research house that stayed under its 100-amp limit through a winter by adjusting heat-pump and water-heater settings, and a PG&E program, PanelBoost, that for now offers a waitlist. The Oakland school district's own pilot of portable heat pumps is still being planned.

At Chabot, the teachers are already doing that job by hand. Rotating which rooms cool and when is their way of keeping the total under the limit. The cost is that at any given moment some rooms are hot, and the school has to choose which ones, in a building whose wiring the teachers don't own and can't change.

Questions to ask about your building

Whether you're a school parent, a renter or a homeowner, these questions follow the chain from your outlet outward. They won't make you an electrician, but they can help you figure out who to call and what to ask.

• Which link is the problem? A single circuit, the panel, the service or the street? "The wiring is old" can mean any of the four, and each has a different fix and a different wait.
• Who controls the next step? The landlord, the district's facilities office, the state architect's office, a city inspector or PG&E?
• When does the clock start? At your first call, when the paperwork was complete, or when your side of the work was finished? Does it include permits? Does it pause when the utility finds work needed farther up the line?
• What does the money cover? The machine, the wiring inside, utility work, permits and the monthly bill are separate costs, and programs usually pay for only some of them.
• What counts as done? Installed, connected, or a room cool enough for a child to think in?
• What does a workaround give up? Lower-power machines and controllers can avoid an upgrade by limiting how much runs at once or how hard it runs.

The district has Chabot down for window film and hasn't published anything about its wiring. Until it does, the school's heat plan is the one its teachers worked out on their own this fall, taking turns with the power the building has.