|
|
| Topic: Its Electric. Burried Electric. |
| Date: 2013-04-27 21:18:38 |
| Message: It's about time for an upgrade, of the electric lines that run to our house, that is. We have the original overhead wires from the street to the house that are over 60 years old.  They're loosing the insulation on the lines and the cedar trees like to reach down and mingle in the lines when they're heavy with snow each winter.  The house had two 60 amp meters and we felt it was time to upgrade those to a bigger service also.  Part of the work to upgrade service and put the lines underground was to dig a trench to place conduit to run the lines through. We went to the store and found a can of field marking paint, the kind used for soccer fields and marked where we were going to dig. This was required for the 800-dig-right service to mark where other utilities might be, and was helpful for me to make sure I dug a straight trench.  I was seriously tempted to draw funny faces elsewhere in the grass with the paint, but was glad I didn't because that paint stuck around for weeks! We rented a walk behind trenching machine to dig the trench. It was a lot of fun and even piled the dirt up along side the trench for us. I regret not getting a picture of the trencher, it was pretty neat. With the trench dug to approx 30" deep (deeper than required), the conduit was placed down into the bottom.  We decided to upgrade to a new 200A meter to insure we had enough power for anything like additions to the house, heated pool, welder, or all three. You know, in case we wanted to weld while standing inside a pool inside our new addition. We'll have to figure out how to fix up the siding where the old meter was.  Out at the street was a sweeping 90* piece of conduit was placed and readied for Ameren to pull the cable through up to the meter.  We filled back in the trench and waited for Ameren to come by. When they came they brought two trucks, one with the wire on big spools (shown just over the top of the fence in the center) and one bucket truck (shown just over the top of the fence to the left).   They crew pulled the cable through the conduit in no time at all, and the wire truck moved out of the way so the bucket truck could get closer to the pole.  The worker in the truck drilled holes in the pole for brackets to support vertical conduit to run the length of the pole.  Once the brackets were in place, they added a couple of pieces of conduit up the pole, and ran the wire through them also.  Garrison noticed the workers were wearing protective glasses so he went to get his glasses too. It was sprinkling rain while the workers were here, so Garrison also felt the need to get his umbrella.  |
 |
Comments For This Post: (0) Read Comments | Post Your Comments |
| Back to Main Blog |
To view this website, you will need Adobe Flash Player
|
