The city told me that there is now an ordinance to bury the lines 200 amps and over. Our stove, hot water heater and furnace are gas. The clothes dryer is ready to be replaced and it will be gas. We don't need air conditioning in this area. If nothing else would upgrading to 100 amps be a good improvement to make for the future for other home improvements? Would the 100 amp service also add value to the house or would it just be an expensive upgrade to go over the 60 amps? The electrician says going up to 100 amps is a necessary upgrade.

Inspections are as individual as the persons who do them. I have encountered within one inspection department interpretations of the code that differ 180 degrees. In one such large department, one inspector refused to recognize Article 110.26(A) (Exception No.1) while another inspector agrees that it means just what it says. Your best bet is to just have your electrician apply for a "service change" -- nothing more. The outcome is uncertain.

You cannot future proof a panel, only guess at it. If you need the room now, upgrade but if you don't, just leave it untill you do. 3 yrs ago we were running 4x60 watts in 2 kitchen light fixtures. Now we are running 4 fixtures with 8x13 watt bulbs. That went from 240 watts to 104, more than 50% reduction. Our frig, freezer, dehumidifier and window air conditioner went the same way. We are actually using less electricity now than we did when we bought the house 6 yrs ago.

If I could add one thing here, as a person who lives in a house with electric baseboard heat: I have found that electric baseboard heaters foster high heat loss, perhaps because they excessively heat the wall above the heater, causing more rapid heat loas to the outdoors. (If my memory of high school science and "Delta T" is accurate.) In addition, following standard HVAC practice they're often placed below windows, further accelerating heat loss for the same reason. Realizing that all electric resistance heat is the same 100 percent efficient (but not cheap, owing to high electric rates compared to other energy sources) this is the only way I can account for the fact that using plug-in electric space heaters (generally fan-forced units) in the house will cause the rooms to be warmer for less energy cost. If this were my house I'd look at the fan-forced electric wall-mount heaters. For one thing they're way faster to warm a room than baseboard, and they're safer than infrared, which operate by design at high temperatures. Plus, putting a infrared heater into a wall kind of defeats its purpose: As they are used to heat objects and people directly, infrared heaters are ideally portable units that you can point in the direction where heat is desired. Having said that, I put an infrared heater in the wall of my bathroom, but that's a small room and there aren't many places you can be. But tell you what, I'd be scared of it in a rental house because if you'd leave a towel or something draped in front of it, that infrared heater could start a fire in no time. Fan-forced wall heaters have limit switches that will shut them off if they're covered. Also, to reply to the above, "quartz technology" would be meaningless in an electric furnace. If you embed the units inside an electric furnace where they're not physically exposed to the people and objects you want to heat, you're just turning them into conventional heating elements that heat air by forced convection. Quartz elements are simply designed to operate at a higher temperature so a higher share of their heat can be given off as radiation. You still get one total watt of heat for every watt of electricity you run through it - it's just that you can direct that watt straight at people and feel warm far sooner, as you have pointed out. By the way this is the fallacy of those costly $200+ heaters that look like wooden boxes. If you stick any kind of element in that heater, or use light bulbs, quartz tubes or whatever, you get the same amount of heat, as any radiation effect of whatever element you use is simply absorbed by the box itself and then convected to the room air the same as any $15 heater from a discount store. Just another option to consider.