Into the Crawlspace
Feb. 21st, 2014 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThis afternoon, Lisa got kitted up (old clothes, coveralls, dust mask) and climbed under the house to explore the prospect of running an additional 220V electrical circuit from the master box (which has room for one and only one more such connection) under the house to the forward bathroom. If she can run the wire, we can hire our preferred plumbing company to put in an electric hot water heater and to restore much of the ground floor plumbing, which would go a long way toward making the house more habitable.
There are many other electrical projects we want to do, but they are all on hold until we can talk to the contractor with whom we've previously worked (they replaced the cracked floor joists) to discuss them digging a conduit under Front Street in front of our house (which of course involves getting the necessary permits from the city) preparatory to undergrounding a new utility drop from NV Energy to our box, which will then allow an electrical contractor to replace our underpowered 100A box with a proper 200A box with plenty of room for new circuits. After all, pinball machines need dedicated power circuits; they draw a lot of juice.
Lisa concludes that the project is feasible, although there are tricky elements (not a whole lot of room in the existing electrical conduit for another wire, for starters). This weekend we need to measure more closely to determine how much wire we'll need to buy to do the job. She'd prefer 8 gauge wire to give some leeway, but probably will have to use the somewhat thinner 10 gauge if the calculations show that it is sufficient for the circuit she wants to install.
While she was down there, she reacted with great annoyance to the large amounts of scrap pipe and old busted heating conduit laying about under the house, and she made an effort to pass some of the junk out the access port to me. Various workers over the years doing repairs and upgrades have simply left junk down there rather than cleaning up when they were through, and she doesn't like it, as it makes it hard to crawl around there to get work done.
There are many other electrical projects we want to do, but they are all on hold until we can talk to the contractor with whom we've previously worked (they replaced the cracked floor joists) to discuss them digging a conduit under Front Street in front of our house (which of course involves getting the necessary permits from the city) preparatory to undergrounding a new utility drop from NV Energy to our box, which will then allow an electrical contractor to replace our underpowered 100A box with a proper 200A box with plenty of room for new circuits. After all, pinball machines need dedicated power circuits; they draw a lot of juice.
Lisa concludes that the project is feasible, although there are tricky elements (not a whole lot of room in the existing electrical conduit for another wire, for starters). This weekend we need to measure more closely to determine how much wire we'll need to buy to do the job. She'd prefer 8 gauge wire to give some leeway, but probably will have to use the somewhat thinner 10 gauge if the calculations show that it is sufficient for the circuit she wants to install.
While she was down there, she reacted with great annoyance to the large amounts of scrap pipe and old busted heating conduit laying about under the house, and she made an effort to pass some of the junk out the access port to me. Various workers over the years doing repairs and upgrades have simply left junk down there rather than cleaning up when they were through, and she doesn't like it, as it makes it hard to crawl around there to get work done.
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Date: 2014-02-22 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 06:29 am (UTC)I used to work for an electrician, and we would occasionally upgrade people's service from 30A to something that was actually useful - at the time, usually 125A (this was close to 20 yrs ago).
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Date: 2014-02-23 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 07:06 am (UTC)