July 13, 2003

Today's work began here. Don't feel bad if you don't recognize the location, I am the only one who has ever been in this location, it is in the crawl space at the NW corner of the laundry room and is where the water enters the house. So how does this fit into the shop project? It is a long story, but it involves the electrical service to the machine shed, which up to this point has come from the neighbors electrical service. When we moved here this was the set-up and even though it has been nice knowing that it doesn't cost us a cent for electricity for the shed and with the neighbors permission, but it also can be inconvenient. You see sometimes as they clean up the bins after hauling corn the workers shut off our electricity, and this is just what happened last week. So since the new shop is getting a new electrical service I decided that instead of running cords I would hook up a temporary power using a spare wire buried with the new water line.

Luckily when I was working on the water line a year or so ago I buried several cables with the thought, "just in case," and in this case just in case worked out. The picture above shows the utility box out by the new shop where the cables come out of the ground and the new conduit exits for the shop. I was able to connect the spare cable to the old pump breaker out at the utility pole (a previous hook-up) and then run new cable through the conduit to the shop area. I connected a small rain tight panel I had to the new cable and installed a double gang outlet, and that now gives us power to the shop, at least until I hook up the main service once the building is standing. I used an extension cord and back-fed the shed service through an outlet (its a real rig job, think of a short extension cord with two male ends)

All of this took about half the day, but without out it we would be forced to run extension cords over 150 feet every time we wanted to work and then pick them up again, this would be too much hassle. The rest of the day was spent in completing the temporary concrete form in the garage door area and backfilling both sides.

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