hr3
Veteran Member
Sorry Mark,, your right and the most important thing he can do is check with his local utility and code office to see what they require,,
Underground Service Question
- Thread starter Believer
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Red55
Gold Member
Great Idea! I used some of that blue (or pink) foam stile sealer 6" above our sewer injection line. 12 yrs later when we had a slight leak at a failed coupling it was a life saver cause of the amount of hand digging (raw soil
) it saved. -EdIllini22
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4/0 phases and a 2/0 nuetral al. will carry 200 amps all day long. I personally like direct bury I did it for 21 years at the major electric utility in chicago, the last 5 at a public utility we put everything in pipe. You can use 3" for up to 350 aluminum with no problem. To me its easier to fix direct bury than pullying200 feet of wire out of a pipe to fix You just need a fault finder to find bad spot and dig it up splice and shrink tube it, in the mean time you still have power in your building from the other phase, of course I've only fixed a few thousand faults.
slaveToHorses
Gold Member
Good point about fixing it. Although I haven't ever had a UG service fail inside a conduit before. I would think the chances of a failure inside a sealed conduit to be pretty dang slim. But I don't have your experience either.
I did 3 on my property. One was before the meter, 150' from pole to house. The local power co said to use 2" electrical PVC.
I did the rag tied to a rope and pulled through with a shop vac trick to install the pull rope. I also installed a smaller conduit for the phone and cable co.
I did 3 on my property. One was before the meter, 150' from pole to house. The local power co said to use 2" electrical PVC.
I did the rag tied to a rope and pulled through with a shop vac trick to install the pull rope. I also installed a smaller conduit for the phone and cable co.
Lineman North Florida
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All cable be it secondary or primary has a reasonable life expectancy, being direct buried shortens that life expectancy in certain soils, an earlier poster stated his personal preferance to direct bury and it certainly is cheaper and easier, but you as a homeowner probably don't have access to a fault locator and will have to pay someone to come locate the fault and then your yard has to be dug up to fix it, not to mention you will need splices to repair the wire and a special tool to crimp the splices etc etc, basically it is not a homeowner project, I spend a lot of time finding burnouts on my friends barn services cowlot lights etc that I tried to get them to install in pipe years ago when they did these projects. Schedule 40 gray electrical conduit is cheap insurance to keep from having to deal with these issues 20 years down the road and if the wire outlast's you your kids will say dad was a smart man and thank you for your forethought, what ever you decide burying in pipe is the smartest thing to do. I am an electrical lineman by trade, mostly overhead but a little in underground and this advice is just what I have learned over the past 24 years, I hope it helps, good luck.
SuperCobra
Silver Member
Some more unsolicited advice:
I thought for sure that I could save money renting a trencher, buying the wire, and doing all of it myself - so I didn't even bother comparing. Just had to have the electric coop guy come hook it up to the meter. When he came out I found out they would have done the whole thing for about half of what it cost me - bulk wire prices, etc.
DELInstallations
Bronze Member
We have to mark all buried utilities like that in my area
deere5105
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I work for an electric co-op in the design end. We made a swap about seven years ago to putting everything in conduit. 3" Sch. 40 electrical PVC is the standard. Some applications require different size conduit, but 90% is covered by 3". We have a website that you can go to that gives guides on the conduit installation and shows what we require of our consumers. The site is Pearl River Valley Electric Power Association. Your local provider may also have something like this. I do not recommend ever direct burying the wire. Conduit provides protection not only to the wire, but also to anyone that may inadvertantly dig into it. Someone mentioned the marking tape which is also a good idea. I have seen some electricians use a tape that has some sort of strip on it that can be detected by a metal detector. Someone also mentioned the difficult task of locating a fault in a direct buried cable. We have special tools for this purpose and even using them it is still a pain. Sounds like you have already decided to go the conduit route. You won't regret it.
deere5105
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Believer,
The information is a little hard to find. Go to the site and click on new service, then there is a place to click for a link to temporary and permanent service specifications. I am going to attempt to past a link to it here: http://www.prvepa.com/forms.htmlk Hope this helps. Again I would recommend contacting the local utility to see if they have specific requirements. We typically meet our consumers on site and go over the route we want them to take, the details around the installation and any site specific issues. One other thing I failed to metion is that just as someone else mentioned, it is rare that a private homeowner can come out ahead by doing it himself. We reduce the cost by several dollars per foot if they install the conduit, but by the time you get a machine and the material it is usually not much savings to do it yourself. I have dealt with several situations where someone tried to do it themselves and I had to turn them down and in some of the situations they chose to scrap their attempt and let us come put it in. We require an inspection before backfilling and one guy put in over 900' over the weekend. By the time we got to inspect it on Monday it had rained and floated his pipe up. He never finished the installation and wound up selling the property. The next owner just paid us to run it.
Deere5105
The information is a little hard to find. Go to the site and click on new service, then there is a place to click for a link to temporary and permanent service specifications. I am going to attempt to past a link to it here: http://www.prvepa.com/forms.htmlk Hope this helps. Again I would recommend contacting the local utility to see if they have specific requirements. We typically meet our consumers on site and go over the route we want them to take, the details around the installation and any site specific issues. One other thing I failed to metion is that just as someone else mentioned, it is rare that a private homeowner can come out ahead by doing it himself. We reduce the cost by several dollars per foot if they install the conduit, but by the time you get a machine and the material it is usually not much savings to do it yourself. I have dealt with several situations where someone tried to do it themselves and I had to turn them down and in some of the situations they chose to scrap their attempt and let us come put it in. We require an inspection before backfilling and one guy put in over 900' over the weekend. By the time we got to inspect it on Monday it had rained and floated his pipe up. He never finished the installation and wound up selling the property. The next owner just paid us to run it.
Deere5105
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