Yesterday I hand-dug two trenches in our back yard. One was 2-feet deep by 40 feet long, the other was 1-foot deep by 30 feet long. (the frost just came out of the ground last week so luckily for me, the ground was super-soft and easy to dig) At the bottom of the 2-foot deep trench was the existing buried cable for the 110V power from the house to the garage, which called for careful digging. Once that cable was fully exposed, I removed it and replaced it with a 6/3 underground feed (uf) cable to feed a new 50A sub-panel in the garage.
Next, I inspected the old 12/2 uf cable for damage and finding none, I cut that cable at the house, and then ran it in the other trench from the garage to the shed in the back yard. Once both cables were ran, I filled the trenches back in and put the grass back on top. (the forecast calls for rain on 6 of the next 8 days so I wanted to get this done) The cable to the shed is not complete, but only coiled up alongside the shed until I figure out how I'm going to get it inside, as the shed was installed on top of an old 1-car garage slab that is quite deteriorated, but not deteriorated enough for me to easily punch through the concrete so I'm probably going to have to rent an electric rotary hammer to finish the project but that's okay. I still need to buy the receptacles, boxes, and a light for the shed anyway.
I had already installed the 50A sub-panel in the garage last year, but it was only being fed temporarily by the 110V line, so I had to remove the jumpers I had installed, (so both circuits could be fed from the one line) switch what was the incoming power to a 15A breaker which will now feed the shed, and land the new 6-gauge conductors on the main terminals. Then I buttoned up the garage panel.
In the house, I had to finish running the 6/3 from the wall to my main breaker panel in the basement. I had removed an unused 30A 2-pole breaker a couple of weeks ago, so all I had to do was snap in the new 50A breaker and land the conductors on the ground bar, neutral bar, and then on the breaker. Then I buttoned up the main panel, switched on the new breaker, went out to the garage and Viola! - everything worked.
After cleaning up all the dirt I had tracked into the house along with the sawdust from drilling holes in the joists, my total time yesterday was almost 12 hours. Today I just have to label the breakers in the sub-panel and re-label the breakers in the basement panel.
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