Electrical Service Upgrade, Part 3

We finished a project!

I was sure bummed a couple of weeks ago when our electrician friend said he wouldn’t be able to make it over to help with our final hookup anytime soon. He had committed to another project that was taking way too long. Then, Sunday morning he called and asked Trissa if we wanted to do the switchover that very day! Trissa was sick Sunday, but I was raring to go!

The final phase of this project went very smoothly. Our friend arrived and immediately checked the work I had done on “the build”. The build consisted of the infrastructure needed for the new service entrance: conduit, meter-plug, copper, and the new main panel. I had only neglected one thing – using some plastic bushings on the conduit as it entered the panel and the meter socket box. This was easily rectified.

After this “inspection”, we got to work. The first thing we did was switch over a single circuit from the old panel to the new. This would provide us with power for a work light once we switched the power over to the new system. Then, we pulled the meter head. One quick motion to pull it out of the socket, and the house was out of power.

The difficult part was next. Our old service line was attached to the house too low, and the plan was to raise it two feet to the new weather-head I’d installed. Because of the way the wire was strung from the street, it was extremely heavy and taught. The other concern (which at least in part motivated this whole project) was that the anchor holding the wire to the house was visibly pulling away. We were concerned that once we started pulling on it, it could get away from us and fall to the street, uncontrolled.

We finally decided to tie a nylon rope to the service wire with a knot that would tighten on itself (so it wouldn’t slip), and string it through a pulley so that we could pull the wire up to the new location in a controlled fashion. Once in place, we attached a new “Chinese finger” which is a metal version of the no-slip knot we’d used with the rope, and attached the finger to new anchor on the house.

Now the part where our friend earned the lunch that Trissa made him: the live connection. I should say that in order to get to this stage, we had to cut the line – which was ‘hot’. Being very careful and making sure he wasn’t grounded, and that there wasn’t any load on the wirel, my friend cut the service free from its old connection and capped the bare ends. Now he had to connect the line to the new copper I’d run through the conduit and out the weather head. For this we used “butt joints” which are aluminum jumpers that accept two wires and clamp down on them to complete the connection.

The final bit was to transfer the circuits still in the old panel to the new panel. One by one, our house’s circuits came alive. It is so amazing to me how clean, neat, and uncrowded our new panel is. The new panel has 40 slots and we’re using 10: plenty of room for a new set of kitchen circuits, a new hot tub, and whatever we dream up.