It went great! This is the exact same machine I used to cut my footings and for trenching my driveway for the drainage. I absolutely love it - its about 750cc EFI with a 36" blade - the thing cuts through practically anything. On the driveway project we hit some forearm sized tree roots and this thing chewed through in maybe 10 seconds.

My favorite feature is the "intelligent" drive system. Once you set your cut depth, you can just squeeze the speed levers to max and it'll auto adjust movement speed to keep the engine rpm above a certain level. Takes all of the thinking out of it as you just hold the levers to max and it goes as fast as it can for that depth of cut and soil conditions (which for me with this hard dirt is barely a crawl).

The downside for this specific job of course is the size since it's fairly beefy. Had to wander the line a little bit weaving around the shed, trees, etc. Straight enough I wont have to bend the straight conduit sections but it does look like I was drunk when I did it.



Made some more good progress on this part of the project today. I got the pull box / handhole spot dug out, formed up the concrete base, and wet set it in the concrete. Unfortunately I had to extend the height up like this to allow the garage wire to pass straight through (rather than 90* bends up into the box as youd normally see) as Im out of allowable bends in the conduit by this point.

Since it had to fall in this section of conduit, I stuck it behind the shed to hide it. As a side benefit, I did pop in a couple of pass thrus in the form to run smaller conduit to the shed later / after this garage inspection is complete. Id just like to have a basic 20 amp circuit in the shed for lights / and both an internal and external outlet.

Unfortunately itll have to run in separate conduit as Im already capped out on the fill capacity of the main stuff at the schedule 80 verticals. But at least the small stuff is a lot cheaper and Ive already got everything all opened up.

Pic inside (the big pass thrus on the lower left/right are for the garage, the smaller/ higher one on the top and right is for the shed - all of those forms and plugs will come out once the concrete sets up):

 

Overall, looks nice. I honestly don't know if the bend topic is national or regional electrical code. I wonder if the concern is the twisted stands separating or creating stress in the cable. But at lest you will have everything code-compliant!

 

It's national / NEC.

The concern is how much bends increase the required pulling force over a straight run. Stack up too many bends and you end up with so much wire bending at one time that the pull on the end can cause damage/ exceed the strength of the wire causing internal breakage.

There's also a separate calculation for sidewall pressure - where you start damaging insulation because of all of the friction on the jacket at a bend due to a very high level of drag behind it.

Even if the bend requirement didnt exist and I was within spec on the two above values, I still dont think there's any way mine could be pulled in one shot without pro level pulling equipment. Im already worried a bit being at the bend limit - Ive bought a jug of wire pull gel and picked up a manual winch (Ive seen people mount them over the panel to help pull it through).



The other thing is mine is so obviously over the bend limit (by almost exactly double) if done without a box that Id really be risking the inspector calling it out. It likely wouldnt just be a simple box add either, there's a good chance they'd make me replace the feed wire because it means Id either:
-Cheated on the conduit install and glued conduit over the wire or
-Ignored force calculations and just hooked a big machine to yank it through anyways

Both make the wire integrity suspect, especially being hidden.

 

Wasted a good bit of time this morning figuring out a fitting configuration to fit the power feed wires within the wall cavity. The pieces Id picked up had it almost 2" past the studs. So it took a couple trips back to the electrical supply store to find a combo that keeps it easy to bottom feed and within the studs.


Shifted gears to getting the feed wires prepped for install. I bought a 1000 foot spool, so we ran a string through the trench end to end to find tbe exact length (plus some extra on each end for safety). Rolled the spool out and cut the wires to length, then color marked them with electrical tape at each end at the pull box in the middle.

Got them bundled and looped into the trailer for now.




A little premature as it's not on this permit, but I got my AC/heat units in today too. Two 36k / 3 ton mini splits.

 

Made some good headway today. Got the power feed LB permanently mounted up to the garage (still needs paint to make it look nice once we get the permit done) and started running conduit.



Trench and corners are all good to go on depth now up to the pull box. Working now to get the trench hand finished on the house side.

Ran into a stumbling block at the gate through the fence. They've poured concrete across underground between the two gate columns. Its about 18" across and appears to run about a foot deep. Dirt under it is rock hard, so that's going to be a pain to tunnel under. Called it for one night so I can think about path forward.

 

Nice progress! And I like that unistrut (I think that it the material) clamp for the conduit!
I am jealous you were able to come straight out of the ground. I had an edge of concrete to deal with (I think it was the old footer that the builder had to attach to). So I ultimately used a couple 45's to make an offset. But it works.

Curious how you will over come crossing that concrete at the gate!

 

Made some decent progress this weekend. Took Saturday off for a family day, but crunched hard all day Sunday.

Got the conduit cut, glued, and run from the garage to the pull box, and got the wiring pulled through it. Arguably this is the easier half as it's two straight lines into a LB. But this is nearly 3/4 of the total length, so it visibly feels like a lot of progress / used most of the materials pile.

I will say that wire is REALLY tough to pull. I do appreciate its glossy exterior as combined with the pull gel it makes for a pretty slippery surface. I expect it'll be substantially harder on the other side as this side is just a 45 and a 90 (then into the LB, then 90 into the garage).

Temporarily shoved the rest of the wire through the inlet hole so I could stick the lid on - supposed to have some heavy rain tomorrow night, so Im trying to avoid turning it into a total mud pit.




Got that idea from work - they use that stuff for everything. I was trying to avoid any more holes in my stucco / water barrier than I had to, so I think this is a good compromise to meet the clamp requirement.

That is smart! Id never have thought of that - defintiely gives a lot more room to kick out away from the foundation.

After another hour or so poking at it, there's no way Im getting through by hand. So Ive narrowed it down to 2 options:

1) Cut it out and repour it after. Ive got plenty of excess rebar to dowel back in and probably half a pallet of sack concrete so it wouldn't cost a dime.

2) Rent that rotary hammer again and find some kind of shovel/ chisel shaped tip to crank through the hard dirt.

 

Been a little while. Took a couple week vacation to Disney, then spent a couple weeks refinishing the pool again (previous owners painted it to hide the aged plaster when they went to sell, they used acrylic paint so it needs to be sanded and repainted every couple years until we chip out and replaster the whole thing).

Got the garage panel totally wrapped up. Not thrilled with how the neutral came out, but this seemed the easiest / cheapest code compliant option. There's not a way on this panel to do a 3/0 capable terminal at the bottom of either neutral bus (without hacking up the plastic on the panel supports itself). I found pin adapters that would work - but were crimp only / required a $300+ crimper for one fitting.

So instead I settled on this Polaris Tap / swapping it from 3/0 aluminum to 2/0 copper (the max size of the neutral lug) for the last foot.



On the other side of things, I ended up buying a rotary hammer and a clay spade to do the digging under the block wall gate footing. I think it'll help up by the house also to dig around all of those buried power wires. Planning to jump back into that this weekend.

 

Looking good.
I notice something I see debates about. In that wooden header, you have two wires per hole. I have seen discussion behind "it is fine depending on the size of the hole" (as the concern is potential heat) and others that say "one hole per wire to avoid inspector issues".

Interesting idea to transition from aluminum to copper to fit the lug. I mean, it works and should all be compliant.

I noticed the WAGOs at the top right. Not sure I understand what is taking place with that.

 

Dealing with specs almost daily for work, IMO the confusion is 100% due to this code section being poorly worded. IMO when inspectors / AHJs start coming up with different interpretations of such a basic regulation (which they certainly do - there's tons of varying opinion on it), the author of that section has failed at their job / things should be cleaned up at the next rev - which in the case of nec is very often, relatively speaking.

The way I read it, there is no count limit. The max is 2 in a hole which has airflow stopped (fireblock foam, energy caulk, plugged solid with wires, etc) anything beyond that may need to be de-rated (which in itself imposes a limit depending what those circuits are) depending on other variables. So it's not a clear cut count unless the local AHJ supplements this requirement with additional requirements.

TBH even if they wanted to de-rate mine from an absurdly conservative view, it's no issue. The two circuits on the left are dedicated to 2 garage door openers each. Nameplate draw is 3.5 amps each (without applying any kind of power factor from NEC because they're used so rarely). So worst case Ive got 7 amps of draw max on 20 amps wire for each one.

The right side small one is the rear GDO - so it's even safer - 3.5 amps on 15 amp rated wire. The only one even remotely close is orange for the wall outlets, but it's got a good bit of headroom being a 20 amp circuit (without applying any power factor) on 30 amp wire.

The small ones up top are a flat out mistake. I measured the run to the rear GDO and came out almost dead on at 40 feet. Bought a 50 foot roll and came up a magically a few feet short. Id already run the wire all the way there, so I didnt want to tear it out and re-buy. I could've just made it to a breaker in the top right corner (if I used every bit of that last 6ish inches of gnarled end), but figured that would look more goofy as it would be apparent every time you opened the panel to see one solo breaker.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but there's no way that roll was 50 feet. I knew it would be close from the rough geometry, so I ran a tape measure down the whole route (each vertical leg separately, including kinks and the horizontal) and even my safe bet math barely hit 40. The wire is run flat/straight everywhere - stapled at the top of every truss, so there's no way I lost 10 whole feet during install. Ill be sure to roll it out and check next time if I have another close run - I got absurdly lucky it at least made it into the box / I didnt have to add an external splice box or rerun it.


The larger two are because Im running all of the wall outlets off one 20 amp beaker. So they join the hot and neutral of the two branches (one coming in from the bottom, the other from the top) before it goes into the breaker. I plan to run several other branch circuits later at targeted locations (bench, etc) , so I didnt really have any desire to split left and ride side onto 2 different breakers on this one.