ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Street ligfht voltage, gated community

Scott, has the best idea yet sky light, but I am making a engineering change on the window, and installing a chicken coop vent, and changing the sky light, to a sun catcher, a sky light on the course, may be dangerous.

Marc, can we have another of your everlasting stories, s'il tu plait?

Alan

Okay; here's a movie title that made me laugh...

"THE NEVER-ENDING STORY - PART 2"

OK I managed to actually get a look at this and sneek in 18 holes of golf (I really needed to be able to see it like the customer would).
These do have skylights
I looked at the other "2 holers" to see what they were trying to accomplish and It will just be a fan with a light ... BUT they also have small ice machines at the others so that will be next. I am thinking they should probably drop a multiwire 20a in there at a bare minimum but a small panel is a better plan. They may be thinking about a single 20 for all of this. They have a bid to get the wire in the ground and wire it up for $6,000.
I think I am just going to back off and let them follow their plan but I still want to review the plan to see if they understand little things like voltage drop and the code issues.

Sanity may prevail here. Once they really figured out how much it will cost to do it the wrong way it is starting to look like the right way (FPL setting a meter on the building) may end up being a lot cheaper.
I am amazed at the lengths people go to, avoiding getting a permit and doing things the right way.
They hit a fiber a couple days ago on another job so they are starting to see the dangers of digging near the road.

Well FPL finally got around to returning the proposal. It turns out doing things the right way ends up being a whole lot cheaper than bootlegging in a feeder. The bid on the feeder was $4000. FPL wants $250 to provide 120v (probably from the street lights) and $750 to set a transformer and provide 240v. They are going for the 120v if FPL will actually do it.
The story is the engineer may nix the 120 option once it finally gets down to doing it, in spite of saying they would. It may help that they really only want 20-30a.

Greg,

Around here most street lights are 120 V unless you are near the interstate crossings and the big HPS lights. They usually are 277/480 volt lights. As for digging up here you have to call an 800 tel. number or else it could cost you a big fine from the utility co. There was 1 person just this week trying to dig in new water services when he hit a high voltage underground feeder cable. The sparks were flying that day.

Utility companies in New Jersey have the legal authority to levy fines???! How in the world does that work? I thought that was a function reserved to the government; how in the heck did we get to such a corrupt place that private companies are levying fines?

No, it is a civil fine but the utility could be the one that reports you.



It's pretty much the same all over, if you don't simply call the free utility marking number and go ahead and dig up a utility you will be liable for all damages and the fines.

OK, that's more-or-less how it should work. That's a huge difference from "a big fine from the utility co."