The weather was mild today, only 79 degrees, so at lunch we removed a tree....a Eucalyptus tree, it was near death anyway and I need the room for a car port for the truck





What does this have to do with the pool install you ask? Nothing except we will be doing some trench work to install the underground electricity and building a footing for the wall, so it was kind of in the way

Then we removed the fence, it will be replaced by the 7' block wall



Then we removed the concrete from the corner of the garage. The corner is where we will be installing the new meter base and main panel.





we will install the panel and start the trench work this Sunday.....going to a city wide garage sale and then to a gun show tomorrow morning, then off to the races

Worthy thread!!

Very cool

Only suggestion I’d make is to lay an extra conduit or two out to the garage while you have the trench open

If you ever want to run cable or internet out there you can. Or run a wire to control lights from the house

we thought about that, have you seen conduit prices lately? Everything is going up in price. We decided to delay the building of the shop for a year or so to see if prices go back down.

My garage is pretty big, I should have room (once organized) to work on my projects and do some reloading this winter.

Is there a local code regarding conduit? You don't have to stick with Sch40. I've seen people lay 2729 drain pipe down, or Sch40 PVC foam core (residential waste pipe) and spraypaint it gray.

codes are very loose here, AZ is following the 2011 NEC and the county doesn't enforce a lot of it. The inspector is basically looking for cable size and terminations, not really worried about the depth of the trench or type of conduit.

As it is we are following code, going 18" + on the depth and using Sch 40 PVC. We went with Aluminum wire as it is 1/2 price of the copper.

When I ran power to my shop I put it in 2-1/2” conduit then ran an extra 3” conduit. Right now I just have a PEX water line for the garage hose bib and 5e for internet running through it. The 5e isn’t rated for that but it works fine, and I already had a spool of it

If I had it to do again I’d just do a couple 1” or 1-1/2” conduits. That size isn’t too bad on price

conduit= 1.5 x diameter of the wire(s)?

Looks like fun brother!!! Thanks for sharing.
I miss all the cool big projects that I built over the years but the way thing are I’m gonna enjoy standing around holding up a shovel...

quick update

I bought the new panel, went with an Eaton product.....the model HPC40SHL, it has the meter base (with bypass for meter swaps) and one 200A 2pole breaker with option for a second 200A 2pole breaker. So I bought the second breaker and we installed it on the corner of the garage

https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us/skuPage.HPC40SHL.html




Then we start digging with the back hoe and shovels



We dug the trench to the existing panel first, we had to remove some of the existing concrete pad. We will cut it clean later so we can pour new concrete

Over the weekend we got the trenches dug







and the conduit installed.




The two pipes sticking up in the air are the water and electrical for the pool house



we have our 1st inspection tomorrow, then we start pulling wire and building the forms for the wall footing. Concrete is coming on Saturday

we had our rough in inspection, it went well, nice kid. He answered our questions and provided guidance.

We laid down the required red burial tape and began burying the conduit. It was hot yesterday, 111.....



we used a "jumping jack" to compact the soil



then finished filling in the ditch





then we dug a 3 foot wide ditch for the footing for the wall. The wall will be 7 feet high.



Then I had to remove another section of concrete under the old panel so I could install a second ground rod

First class work, Casey! And ditching in 111 degrees sounds like a good time!

Wow. Yeah I was whining at 84°F

Good work!!

We can't wait!