Unboxing the Electrical Service

This weekend has been very busy, but mostly with non-house-related things (though we hope to have some very good news to share with you soon). At the last minute, to pull a rabbit out of a hat, we did a little work on the electrical supply.

Noel took the new junction box for the basement and marked where it needs holes cut in it. Once again, my little cheap Fiskars circle cutter came in handy. Who says you can't use scrapbooking supplies in home improvement?

Neither of us had any good ideas for cutting the metal box, so we asked around and it seemed like the idea was to drill a starter hole, then use the jigsaw to cut the hole. So that was what Noel did.

They came out pretty good, I think.

Noel tried the connector to the conduit onto the box and widened the hole a little with a file to make it fit, which worked pretty well, but there was also the connection to the main panel which is a different size. He decided to just remove the box, temporarily rewiring things in place without it. This is not a code-approved setup, but it's OK during construction as a temporary thing.

(Rosie has her opinions, of course.)

So Noel shut off the main switch and we went down in the basement to do some work. You can see off to the right here that it was actually light out, but it was super dark in the basement on account of it having no windows.

The longest part was going through and systematically labeling each connection so that we would know which wires went where. Everything had to be undone then redone once the box was removed (and will have to be undone and redone again in the new box, eventually).

It does not look pretty, and it is not in focus (hello, one-handed shooting in the dark), but it is functional. We decided the front outside outlet didn't need to be connected for now, since we hardly every use it.

Noel took the connector for the big conduit from the main panel up and tried it on the new junction box, and lo and behold it fit perfectly, so that's a win.

I'd hoped to get more plumbing done this weekend but I'm pretty happy with this progress.

posted by ayse on 04/06/14