Of Electrical Services…..(updated)

Darkness crept back into the forests of the world.

Rumor grew of a shadow in the East, whispers of a nameless fear, and the Ring of power perceived.

Its time had now come.

 

And welcome friends of Middle Earth to another edition of the Hobbit Hollow Construction Blog! Apologies for last weeks lack of a blog post. It wasn’t in the cards. We went to visit Jude up at Sienna College in Albany, New York last weekend. It was really nice seeing him and his friends.

Yes people the time has come. We began the connection of the service entrance to the house this weekend. With a little help from Terence and his friend Paul.

So yeah I called up the electrical inspector and got the low down on my service entrance issues. Turns out I have to get a disconnect/reconnect permit. Which means that the electrical company has to disconnect the meter at the pole on the property. Once this is done I can connect the wires to the existing meter. I then have the electrical inspector come out and look at my work. If everything is fine then the electrical company comes back out and reconnects the meter and we then have the permanent power hooked up inside the house. This will let me install a number of outlets and lights inside the house as well as put some heat inside the house so we can work inside this winter. That could be clutch.

So that’s the plan.

I was also planning to put a bunch of pictures I took into the blog post to show you all what we did. But for some unknown reason I couldn’t download any of the pictures. These computers are driving me nuts. It’s like every time I go to download the pictures off my I-phone I do it a different way. What’s up with that?

So as of now I’m going to post this tonight with the intent of adding my pictures hopefully Monday if all goes well.

Okay folks I was able to download the pictures finally with the Editor’s help. I’m just not that good with the technical stuff people. Let’s see what I can show you.

Terence and Paul getting the service wires peeped.
Terence and Paul getting the service wires prepped.

So what are they doing? Well what we have to do is pull these three  heavy duty wires through a 2 inch conduit and into the panel box that is inside of the house. In order to keep things neat and manageable I had them tape the three wires together every three foot on center or thereabouts. This way as I’m pulling them through with the rope they can push them towards me from the outside as a single unit. A little hard to imagine but trust me this made everything a lot easier.

Wires pulled into the panel box.
Wires pulled into the panel box.

So in order to pull the wires through the conduit I used a shop vac to suck a small string through the 2 inch conduit. Once I had this small string in my hand I attached a heavier yellow poly rope to it and pulled that through. Then I carefully wrapped the poly rope around the wires and duct taped the poly rope to the wires. Then working together I had Paul pull on the rope as Terence and I pushed the wire into the conduit. The above picture is the wire after we pulled/pushed it through.

Terence and Paul installing the conduit.
Terence and Paul installing the conduit.

Once we had the wire pulled into the panel box inside the house I had the boys encase the wire in conduit. Pretty simple. Just run a piece of 2 inch schedule 40 pipe over the tail end of the wire and slide it to the pipe sticking out of the house and then glue it together. This is a little easier than trying to push all the wire through the whole length of conduit all at once.

Cutting off the excess wire with a hack saw.
Cutting off the excess wire with a hack saw.
Almost ready for disconnection.
Almost ready for disconnection.

So you can see that there are three pipes they installed. One 2 inch line for the house power. Another 2 inch line for cable tv and telephone. If there is such a thing 5 years from now. And a one inch line for the grounding wire.

So we’re almost set now. I connected all the wires at the panel box Monday and just have a few adjustments I want to do before we are ready. One of which is I have to switch out my ground. I got a #6 ground wire and it seems I need #4. We’ll take care of that this week though.

You know what’s really weird? There are leopard frogs all over the place on the property. I don’t think I’ve ever remember seeing frogs in October.

Leopard frog.
Leopard frog.

Okay so right now I’m sitting in my living room waiting for the start of the second presidential debate. Wow. Thank God the heir to the Throne of Gondor didn’t have to go through this. Not going to get into politics here. Going to keep it simple.

Hopefully going to start the skylights next weekend.

Have a great week.

Hobbit Hollow Jim

 

 

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