ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area 1,200 Amp House Service Repair

Well Friday turned into an 18 hour day.

I had to bring a crew to a house (about 22,000 sq ft.) to fix a problem with the service.

Water was coming into the service disconnect by way of three 4" PVCs running from a pad mount up a hill from the house.

The plan sounded simple, dig down outside the house, cut into the PVCs and turn them up into a large hand hole, then install new conductors into the house. The idea being any water coming down the hill would come out of the PVCs and drain into the open bottom hand hole. We also had to change the main breaker as it had gotten wet a number of times.

Sounded easy......

The guys start digging, the material was stone dust and sand, as soon as you went down the sides would collapse. This was at first an inconvenience, then it started threatening to undermine an expensive stone wall and finally it was just getting dangerous to the men in the trench.

We also thought we would only be down about 3' we ended up down about 6'-6".

In this first picture you see an overview, you can also see one of the guys down in the trench. Not the blue shirt, look low for the black shirt.



This next picture you can see all the shoring we had to put in after a trip to the local Big Orange.



In this picture you can see the water draining from the PVC after a hole was punched in.



The power company turned the power on at 10:30 PM, 13 hours after they had killed it for us.

I am glad most Fridays are better.

Monday I will be back doing the clean up and finish, I will get some pictures of the job completed.



[This message has been edited by iwire (edited 06-05-2005).]