There should be a lot of meat to this week’s post.

For anyone wanting to do this themselves let me give you the highlights.

Purchase conduit

I’m very happy to report that my Odyssey could hold the 26 10 foot 3 inch pvc conduit. Also Lowes had it for almost $3 cheaper a pipe than Home Depot. $3*25 is roughly $75 cheaper. I’ll take that any day!

I had a lot of “help” getting the conduit from the store. It took at least twice as long to buy it and load up. But that is what memories are made of… right?

little girl climbing toward camera on conduit
2 children in a car with 26 pipes of conduit

There should be a lot of meat to this week’s post.

For anyone wanting to do this themselves let me give you the highlights.

Begin Trenching

Let me start on Monday of this week where most of the excitement happened. I took a day off work because I knew I’d be working on the land. But before I began, I thought ‘let me call the county to make sure I don’t need a permit for this’. Bad idea… They told me I needed 3 sets of plans and I’d have to come in to get the permit. I spent 30 dollars at FedEx PrintShop getting 3 11x17s made up and then drove to the county. Only to meet with someone who actually knew what he was doing and he said “No need to tell us, this is all between you and PGE.”  I guess that was good news. But half my day was wasted…

For the excavator, I tried to use Bailey’s rental here in Brentwood locally, but there’s was in the shop. However, there is a nice place in Antioch called All Star rents that had exactly what I needed! I’m so glad I didn’t need to go to Stockton. And so work began not at 8am but at 1pm…

I met with PGE last Wednesday for a tailgate meeting with PGE. I am my own trenching contractor, so they gave me a lot of pointers on how to install my electricity. Here are my notes (good luck with them)

notes about PGE trenching on graph paper

5 step PGE process

In order to get PGE to turn on power to a transformer (or anything) there are 5 steps:

  1. Tailgate Meeting DONE
  2. Trench Inspection (working on trenches currently. Rain made things difficult)
  3. Mandrel It runs the line of your conduit and cleans it out
  4. Electrical Meter Release
    • County approved meter
    • Meter set and done according to code
  5. Paid Contract (Almost $7000)
PGE Contract with taxes highlighted

I’d like to point out that they add the cost of whatever is called franchise (easement in front of property) because PGE is taxed on it and forward that cost on to me. I was lucky in that I only had 210’ of franchise conduit. My neighbor 2 houses down had over 700’.

Trenching Notes/Learnings

For the trenching, so far (I’m not done) but I have spent close to $1000 between materials and an excavator. Luckily, I didn’t have to pay my friend to get behind it and work on it when I was not able to. I’ll explain the other notes I took in case anyone wants to dig their own trench:

  • Conduit is 3” because I’m doing 320 amps (I should have done 4” conduit for 400amps)
  • 12” wide trench with 2” sand on the bottom
  • Franchise is at least 30” of cover (I dug down 40”)
  • Personal property conduit needs 24” of cover (I dug down 30” should have gone deeper)
  • 10” more of sand on top of pipe, so 12” total
  • The bends in the conduit need a 36* radius. Which they do not sell at Home Depot. I ended up going to Platt Electric out in Livermore
  • Vertical bends also need 36° radius and That is what should bring the pipe the 24” out of the ground into a meter or transformer.
  • In total I have 3 90°s and 1 45° which totals 315° which is the most it can bend!
  • Ensure to get the right glue (the grey kind).
  • Buy collars for each end.
  • Find a buddy who has mule tape otherwise you spend about $100 for a single use (a fancy word for rope that has verified tensile strength).
  • There is an easy way to feed mule tape through a long conduit (balloon video)

I’m particularly proud of learning to use the excavator to dig out part of a trench that was already dug. If you look closely, you can see the bucket/arm of the excavator is turned sideways to get in a trench that is already dug.

arm of excavator is turned sideways over an open trench
view of a large trench from within an excavator

It was difficult to learn this one, and unfortunately, I hadn’t dug this part of it deep enough.

Again, shout out to my friend Mark for helping me in a time of need. And also to Blippi for providing such catchy music that gets stuck in my head every time I say “Excavator”… Now you all can enjoy this catchy tune… You’re welcome!