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06/09/2007: "Darn lucky!"

I went down to the farm last week to help finish the installation of the photovoltaic panels for the water supply. Pat the electrician was on hand to instruct us in the finer points of pulling wire: we had 250 feet of conduit in the ground, and we needed to thread #2 AWG wire through it to connect the outbuilding (where the photovoltaic panels reside) and the house (where the electrical panels reside). On a previous trip Pat had used his "mouse" and a vacuum blower to thread a small string through the conduit; then he used the string to pull a rope through the conduit. In the photo above, Pat is fastening the rope to the wires we were going to pull through the pipe. I examined the end of his rope, and found that he had actually spliced a loop in the rope! "Yeah," he said, "I do it that way because it is more reliable than a knot. This wasn't my best splice, though." Then Pat unrolled the large spool of wire and laid it out in the yard in a couple of long loops.

Pat had also rigged up an old rusty pulley on the post above the conduit opening out at the outbuilding, and Nate and I got the rope over the pulley. This meant that as we pulled down and out, the rope and wire was pulled up and through the pipe. Pat gave us our instructions: "I'm going to put both of you pulling. Stop when I shout, because sometimes I'm gonna have take a break to get the wire lined up. Then when we're actually doing it count one, two, three, PULL, one, two, three, PULL..." Then Pat opened a bottle of special lubricant that he was going to use to make it easier to pull the wire through the pipe; each time he took a break to get more wire ready he poured some lubricant down the conduit opening.

Nate and I got our gloves on, and readied ourselves out at the cowshed. It was a lovely summer day, and I was glad I had put on sunscreen. Across the field we could see as Pat gave the signal, and we pulled about six feet of rope... we counted, but found it was easier just to watch Pat to see when he lifted the wire to put it into the conduit. With two of us pulling, it really wasn't too hard; the rope was a little slippery, but we found that we could bend it and make good friction on our gloves. Pat stopped a couple of times to rearrange wire, we pulled some more, and then suddenly we about fell over: the wire was poking out of the conduit!

As Pat was packing up his tools he mentioned that he had gotten a shock in the barn while cutting some galvanized racking for the panels. "Hmm," I said. "You know that just about everything on the property is farmer-built, and seldom to code. Did you look into it?" He confessed that he hadn't, so we agreed to go look at the breaker out in the barn.



No sooner had we unscrewed the front of the breaker panel when we heard BZZZT, and saw some sparks. "Go back to the house, and turn off the outbuildings," Pat instructed. I ran back back, and turned it off. When I got back, Pat was doing his post mortem: "See this here? It's against code to have a outlet in a panel like this. And see this? The bonding for this bus bar has corroded and come undone, so the neutral is just flopping around. Look at these burned wires; you're lucky the barn hasn't burned down." Yep, darn lucky.



I undid all the connections, and pulled the whole breaker box off the barn wall. I taped up the hot wires, and put a note on the cottage breaker so that no one would turn on the barn tap. Next trip I'll have to fashion a more robust wiring solution for the barn, but at least we still have a barn.