Electrical Wiring

This week just the "boss" and I were working. Our son and daughter-in-law were in Phoenix where their new baby daughter was in intensive care for a few days. They are all home now and our grand daughter is doing just fine so next week it will be back to work for all of us. We began this week by having the HVAC guys finish up their rough in. Here you see the giant "U" that will take the heat output from the furnace and direct it down to the under floor distribution system. We had to have them remove this a few weeks ago so we could install sheetrock on the wall behind it to meet code. As you can see the wall hasn't been completed yet. This is because we have to wait for our final framing inspection prior to installing the rest of the sheetrock. We will call for this inspection in a couple weeks.

Along with the installation of the "U" the HVAC guys ran all the ductwork to the second floor. We are not going to have floor vents on the second floor. As you can see here the vents come up through an existing wall and we will use wall vents instead. This vent will heat both the guest bedroom and the guest bath.

We also had the roofers back to complete the roof. We discovered we had been shorted a few square of shingles but with a quick call to Kuhns Brothers the problem was solved.

The "boss" and I spent the week pulling electrical wire. Here you see the wire for the water heater. More correctly this is cable, not wire. I'm no electrician but when it comes to pulling wire, most anyone can do it. We are using 12/2 with ground for all circuits in the house except for the water heater, oven, and dryer which require a higher rated cable. The 12/2 wire will give us an extra margin of safety throughout the house since it is rated for 20 amps. In many houses most of the lighting circuits are 14/2 which is only rated for 15 amps. Using one step heavier wire than what is required is almost always a good move anyway. The cable you see here is rated for 50 amps even though our water heater will be rated at 40 amps. Where electricity is concerned a little overkill is well worth the extra cost.

Because our electrical box is located on the far side of the garage we had to figure out a convenient way to get the wire from that wall across the garage and into the house. To do this we constructed a trough under the second floor of the garage. The wire runs up through the wall of the garage and across the trough and then down through the kitchen wall to the crawl space and is then distributed to the rest of the house. Here you see the trough with the kitchen wiring already installed.

Here is another shot of this trough. We used a similar system when we built our first house 18 years ago. With this system the wires aren't hanging out where they can be damaged and are all together where they can be organized and protected. When all the wires have been run this trough will be covered by the sub floor.

When pulling wire there are a lot of holes to be drilled through studs and beams. Usually an angle drill works better and fits into tight places but occasionally you'll need the extra torque of a larger tool.

When running wires you should attempt to be as neat as possible. As you can see the wires are kept close to the studs and aren't allowed to just hang. In most areas code requires the wire to be attached to the stud within 12" of any box.

Here you can see one of the insulated staples that we are using to secure the wire to the studs. If you're not careful with these darn things you can easily hammer your fingers. I used needle nose pliers to hold them in place while nailing which works pretty well.

Here are some of the kitchen lighting switch boxes. As you can see we are using plastic boxes in stud walls. They are cheap and easy to install but check your local building codes before spending a lot of money on boxes. Some areas will accept metal boxes only.

We are using metal boxes in all log walls. Plastic boxes just don't lend themselves to mounting in a recessed area such as this.

When running wires it is a good idea to label each end of each wire. That way two weeks from now after you've passed the rough in inspection you won't have to guess which wire is which.

That's it for another week. For just the two of us working we managed to get a lot accomplished. We now have the utility room, pantry, hallway, and kitchen electrical wiring completely roughed in. This is significant when you consider that these four rooms have as many electrical circuits as the rest of the house combined. With our son back with us on Monday we expect to complete the rest of the wiring rough in next week.

Check back soon.