Me, The Egoist

Electrical wiring is probably one of the parts of home renovation work that I like the most. It is sufficiently challenging that you keep thinking, but not so hard that you get frustrated easily.

After my previous success in finally fishing some wire through, I decided to make a small change. I drilled another 1 inch hole in the same space between studs, but against the opposite stud. I’ll use the first hole to handle telecommunications cable like video and networking cable, while the new hole will be used strictly for electrical cable. I easily ran the electrical cable down the new hole and fished it out in the basement. It took be 3 tries to get the required amount of cable pulled, however. I left uncoiled cable loose on the second floor so that it would be able to be pulled down straight. What I didn’t expect was for it to snag the shop vac hose and get tangled up. Oh well, no biggie.

A few suggestions for anyone doing electrical wiring:

• Always route our cable from one end to the other. Don’t place a spool in the middle (even if fairly close to one end) and try to run to both ends. You will spend way too much time trying to run the second side of the pull and have a much greater chance of cutting the cable to be too short. Save your time and money.
• As you are pulling the wire, route it exactly the way you want it to be mounted. This way you don’t have any surprises (like finding out that the cable is going to be run underneath an air duct instead of above because you forgot to route it that way before nailing it down. The sad part is that I was thinking about this exact principle as I was running tonight’s power cable when I discovered that I failed to route the cable around another armored cable properly. This is in no way surprising simply because the existing wiring in the basement is fugly. It used to be worse but my father and I spent 5 days just clearing out a bunch of crap and replacing it.
• Make sure you get the deepest receptacle boxes possible. You will never go wrong with extra space in which to fold in wiring. It’s tight enough by default.
• Always run out cables into the receptacle boxes from the same side (either top or bottom). This lets you remove the retaining clip from the other side, saving about a cubic inch inside. As mentioned above, space is crucial. I discovered this tonight, actually. I decided to run the feed cable up into a receptacle box from the bottom (which made sense), but to split off the down-stream receptacles from wire coming in from the top. Oops. This is 3 incoming cables plus a receptacle which all need to fit inside the same box. It is increadable tight. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it work as-is. We’ll see. I also discovered that this is why whenever possible you want to arrange receptacles on a circuit as a chain (no more than two cables going into a box). This is because receptacles have two terminals per wire (hot or neutral) which means that you don’t need a twist-on connector cap. However, when you have two separate lines which feed off of the same incoming line at a box, you need to use twist-on connectors to allow you to make all of the required connections. This takes up a lot of space.

I managed to the wire installed tonight, cabled all the way to the breaker panel with the breaker installed and tested. This is currently feeding 2 receptacles. Next time I do some work i hope to install the final receptacle on the right branch of the feeding box, and start the long arm on the other side with 3 along that wall. Finally, good news: I no longer need to have an orange extension cord draping though the master bedroom to get power for tools in the ’slave’ bedroom.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.