-> welder. Well, now I really wish I had wired it with a 50 amp service
-> for the welder, and I am figuring out what it will take to make the
-> change.. =20
I made a few mistakes too. I went much larger wire than city code
called for - 12 guage where they allowed 14 or 16. Made it a pain in
the ass to wire the receptacles, but the wire all cost about the same,
so why not?
My problem was, the service entrance I bought for the wire coming off
the pole was only 150 amps, so that limited what I could hook to it.
Duh. And it was expensive, and I'd already had an electrician do all
that part of the wiring, and the power company had already wired it to
the pole, so I lived with it. I've since split one of the 220 circuits
off to two 110s.
Get a BIG service entrance. I wouldn't even consider less than 200
amps, more if you intend to run an air conditioner or something. My
(very old) house has a 60 amp entrance and a bunch of jackleg add-on
boxes that made the city inspector cringe, but it all predates the time
the city adopted an electrical code. I'd do something about it, but the
house is wired with knob insulators and cloth covered wire...
The wires used to come off the pole to the house. I dug a trench and
ran underground-rated wire from the house to the shop, put a new service
entrance on the shop, got everything ready, and had the wires moved from
the house to the shop so the shop would be closest to the meter and the
pole. It appears that in many localities an owner can do his own
wiring, but if you hire someone to do it they have to be certified. In
this case, certified by both the state and the city. I could have done
it all myself, but since I didn't know what the hell I was doing past
stringing the outlets I paid someone to do it and watched. Next time
I'll know.
Electricity is like horsepower. More is better. Someday I might want
to build a Jacob's Ladder like my buddy John has - a 250 amp DC welder
driving a telephone pole transformer, with two eight foot rods. Big
blue-white sparks the size of your arm, walking up the rods to the top
and exploding like hand grenades... the Kid Zapper From Hell...
====dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us========================DoD#978=======
can you help me...help me get out of this place?...slow sedation...
ain't my style, ain't my pace...giving me a number...NINE, SEVEN, EIGHT
==5.0 RX7 -> Tyrannosaurus RX! == SAE '82 == Denizens of Doom M/C '92==
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